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The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method we use at work everyday, which can also be applied to any other areas of life like cooking, cleaning, studying etc. It basically improves productivity in many ways, although it seems to be stupidly simple. It uses a timer to break down the work into intervals/tomatos (traditionally 25 minutes), separated by short breaks.
Here is its traditional recipe:
1- Decide your task
2- Set the timer to n minutes (traditionally 25)
3- Work on the task until the timer rings
4- Take a short break (3-5 minutes)
5- After 4 tomatos, take a longer break (15–30 minutes)
At first it seems like basically taking some breaks while working, but in a more organized way. We all know that frequent breaks improve mental agility, but this technique has more to offer. Since you know that you just have 25 minutes, you will always be trying to complete your task in that time interval. If you did not, you either did not slice your task well so it can be handled within one tomato, or you could not estimate the time required for your task. Either way, you will be always better:
1- After sometime your will realize that you complete your tasks faster.
2- You will be able to break your tasks into small pieces, which can keep you from getting frustrated with your long to-do list. It also improves collaboration in teams, since you can distribute the tasks in a more realistic way.
3- You will be estimating the time required for your tasks more precisely, which will result in planning your daily work efficiently. You will know approximately how many tomatos you need for a specific task.
You can also slightly extend this technique depending on your needs. Here is how we use it in meetings, which may really take some hours:
You know how a meeting can easily be a waste of time. An common exmaple: you would like to discuss about something and decide how to proceed. Since everbody has his/her own idea, and one topic/one idea opens another and another, it is very easy that the topic shifts to somewhere else. And only after an hour you realize that the meeting time is up, you did not make any progress; you rather have more questions in your mind now. We use our tomatos for this problem. When our timer rings (and believe me, at very that moment you will always be surprised when you realize how the time goes by so fast), we ask ourselfs those questions:
“Are we on a reasonable path?”
“Did we get any closer to our goal?”
“Should we get rid of distractions?”
And we focus, start the tomato again and try again. Even while studying or surfing the Internet you realize that you will always keep focusing on your actual goal, instead of getting lost somewhere.
There are many iOS / Android apps out there, which help you doing your tomatos. They mostly produce graphical results so you can evaluate yourself: How many tomatos for which tasks you did? How many times and why were you distracted? You can even rate your tomatos, so at the end you can see which time of the day / day of the week you were more productive for a specific task.
I want to emphasize one more time. It seems extremely simple, yet is very effective.