Hello! I've found myself many times staring at my character studying, but not studying myself.

To prevent this from happening to you and me, I'm making this guide that hopefully will help you in your daily life to achieve whatever goals you have that require time and effort

• Help you start working.
  
• Help you stay focused.
  
• Help you not procrastinate.

• Doesn't help you manage your mental health.
  
• Doesn't help you manage your physical health.

Why do I say this?
It's really important to manage your diet, exercise regularly and maintain your mental health, things that I've seen people do with this game. However, this guide is not aimed at this, I use this game for focusing in my daily tasks and not managing my health. I encourage you to seek help on how to manage it if you're having trouble.

For the sake of completeness, I'll explain what each tool does and all its functions. Feel free to skip to the next section if you already know this.

In this game we have a set of tools that help us manage our efforts.

• To-Do List
  
• Timer
  
• Habits
  
• Journal
  
• Productivity History

We're going to make use of all of them except the Productivity History, It's recent and not that complete, It's very recent though so it's possible it will be updated later. I'm going to explain them all now and later I will tell you how to use them.


This tool allow us to make lists of tasks that we want to complete.
You can see in the picture below, I added 4 lists, and 5 tasks for the "Art" list.



You can also set dates for each task.




The timer helps you track time (Woah).
It has three modes

• Sessions: It's a pomodoro timer, for the people who somehow don't know, it's a technique that breaks sessions of work into intervals of active working and resting. It's designed to help you not lose focus while you work while accounting for distraction with the short breaks.
  
  
  
  After a session has passed, a short break will begin, after the set amount of repeats, a long break will happen.
  
  
• Timer: It counts down by the amount you input. Pretty simple.
  
  
  
  
• Stopwatch: It just counts the time it has passed since you pressed it. Pretty simple.
  
  

It also comes with options

• Automatically fade to minimal look when active : Makes it so it takes less screen space when working.
  
• Prompt before new session : Displays the stop, skip, pause/resume menu when a short break occurs.
  
• Session timer style : You can choose between a circle or a bar being filled while the time pass.
  
• Hide countdown timers : Hides the number so you can't be distracted by the counting down.

You can add and track your habits weekly by selecting the squares. Pretty simple.



You can write here and make separate sheets to organize them.


It also comes with questions about yourself that may help you.



It tracks whatever changes you did in any of the other tools, you can remove them if you like, you can't undo this.

I'll now walk you through what I do to track my daily activities. Feel free to change whatever you need, after all, everyone is different, and you will have your own preferences as to what works for you.


This is the most important step at least for me. If you have clear goals of what you want to achieve this day, you will get much less distracted while working.

For this, we want to open up our Journal, we are going to think what we want to get done, it can be something simple and requires no thinking, for example, studying for a test for tomorrow, or meeting a deadline.
If you are like me though, it can't be so clear, specially when you are in your holiday. For this, we want to write what we want to get done. We can also add a title or some personality into it, or none at all, it's your choice if you want to keep things playful or serious.


This is an example of what I wrote today, I like to write my thoughts so I wrote a fair bit, you can just write a line that says what you will get done though, it's all your choice.


Now that you have your goal defined for today, we want to separate it into smaller parts.
How small? whatever feels comfortable for you. You will probably skip a few steps in some tasks, or find that you overestimated/underestimated how much time did it take for get it done. It doesn't matter, the main goal of this is having a defined path for what you will be working on.


These are the tasks I separated my goal into. You'll see later that I did the last two at the same time. It doesn't matter, as long as you know your path, it's fine.


Now we're here, this is where you put the effort and make results.

The main goal here is getting things done, we already did the thinking and measured our path, now we follow it.

You can do it as you like, personally, I find the pomodoro technique a little restrictive, so I just put the stopwatch and track the time I have been working.
You also want to be marking down your tasks as you are completing them, this helps you track your work and it's a pretty good feeling seeing your progress.

if you're reading this guide, you're probably new into tracking productivity. I recommend you try pomodoro with the settings I have. See if it works for you, also see what makes you stay focused and what distracts you.
Remember, you are your own person and you will have different troubles than others, it's important you track what distracts you and what helps you stay focused in order to exploit this and get you getting the results you want.

How long should I aim for? As long as you're willing to put the effort. Of course, this is not so straightforward, specially when you have a test for tomorrow you've been procrastinating on. But ideally, start slow and get working more and more as you advance your habit. If you've done this correctly, you will find yourself procrastinating less and less, until it's gone completely.


Reference Finding



Sketch



Blocking Colors



Shadow and Light and final details


I got focused on my work so I ended up doing both at the same time, if it happens it happens, don't worry about it, just mark the two tasks at the same time.


We have arrived at our stop, this means one of two things, you finished your work, or the day finished and you didn't get at the point you wanted to.

If you finished your work, great! you now have two options: You can either call it a day, or decide that you didn't get enough work and get working on something again.

If you call it a day, go into your previously written journal and write that you finished, add your own personality to it if you want and call it a day.
If you decide to keep working, in the same journal, make a separation and write that you finished and will start another goal for today. repeat the previous steps, think about your goal, separate into tasks, etc.


Now if you couldn't finish your work either because it took longer than expected, things got in the way, or you simply procrastinated (I've been there many, many times). Don't worry, write in your journal what you did get done, write the reason why you couldn't finish your work and call it a day. You can start where you left off in the next day.

A word of advice for all procrastinators, don't get too caught up if you didn't get anything done, but write it down. It's important to track these problems so you can get better, if you are here, it's because you care about your goals, I hope I can help you achieve them with this guide, I've been there too, and with great effort you can overcome it.

Also, mark your habit tracker if you did one.

You will probably develop a few questions while working with this method, as always, try to answer them yourself.

I tend to answer the questions that pop up leaning towards the "lazy side".
For example, I asked myself how long should I take short breaks? I searched and got into a wikipedia page that said between 5-10 minutes. I decided to lean towards the lazy side and write 10 minutes.
This probably seems counter-productive, but leaning towards less effort helps me stay within the routine and not drop it.

I encourage you to not be like me though, try what works for you, always question if what you're doing is working or not, always evaluate what you're doing and ask yourself if you're going towards a good path or a bad path. If the latter, think what can be done to overcome it.

I apologize if my english is bad, it's not my first language.
This guide ended up being larger than I thought but no matter.

Also, I hope you like my pomegranate study, The shadows are kinda off and it isn't polished at all, but it's not meant to be perfect, it's meant to make me paint again, so it's a success!.

That is everything. Feel free to ask any questions, I'll answer whenever I can.

I hope this helps you if you find yourself in bad habits and you want to stop procrastinating, I believe that if you are willing to search for this guide, you are willing to put the effort into getting the results you want, best of lucks to you!.