Increasing Productivity With A Tomato 🍅

Happy Monday, curious reader,

Last week was one of the most productive weeks of my life, when it comes to coding. What changed?

Well, my current workplace continues to get worse and worse and has truly lit a fire under me to continue working hard and ramp up my portfolio projects. Another thing that changed is my re-utilization of a technique named after a tomato…

Yes, this is well known by now and many people have sung it’s praises, however, after struggling the week before with focus I cannot believe how well I did with it.

I chose to do 50 minute stints with a 10 minute break at the end of each one. Another common schedule is 25/5 which is 25 minutes on with a 5 minute break, however, the 50/10 split allowed me enough time to dig into the code without a break interrupting my flow.

I am personally using the Pomodoro timer built into TickTick, my preferred to-do list app, but you can use whatever you like. Another few options are:

I also began practicing what I’ve read in Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work, but I’ll save more on that for another time.

What’s my point here?

If you are feeling stuck, never be afraid to try something again even if it didn’t work for you in the past.

While I don’t have a new blog post to share just yet, it is in the works! This will be about the CSS Reset I put together and am using in all of my new projects. I can’t wait to get this out there for people to read- maybe it’ll inspire you to use it or revise your own! Here’s a little snippet in the meantime.

I haven’t used Upscale too much yet, but the few times I have, I’ve been impressed. If you have a low resolution image you want to try and use on the web, give this a shot!

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Doodle Ipsum is a handy little placeholder image tool I found and started using in a current project (see below). There are other placeholder image services available, but I like that this one actually has images that look like finished products and I could imagine some might even use in the finished product.

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The title makes this pretty self-explanatory, but if you want easy to setup meta tags for your website and projects, metaSEO makes it easy. It even includes support for the share images so long you have it hosted somewhere and can provide a URL for it.

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