For the past few weeks, I’ve tried adding something new to my existing pomodoro routine: a daily and weekly summary of what I’ve done.

Over the past few years, I’ve been a fairly steady practitioner of the habit of marking what I do in any given 25-minute work cycle. However, I’ve felt of late that while I usually had a good sense of what my goals had been and whether I had accomplished them for any given small part of the day, I didn’t have a clear sense of what I had done over the day as a whole—much less at the end of a whole week.

So I just started summarizing it at the end of each day, or early the next day, and pulling those summaries into a single document at the end of the week. (If you’re curious, I’ve been doing all of this in Bear, which of course I use in its Markdown mode.) So on any given Friday, I can actually look at my week as a whole and have some concrete sense of what I’ve accomplished.

I’ve only done this for the past three weeks, but I really like it and I intend to keep it up.

The main thing I need to figure out how to integrate into it is non-work tasks. And really, that goes for my life in general right now. I’m still sorting through what it looks like to just be working a full-time job and having a few side projects. But I’d like to be able to look back at the end of each month and boil down those weekly summaries, and at the end of the year likewise with the months—and from the combination, actually know a bit more concretely what my year was like.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m sure I’ll be back with more to say in this space soon enough.