The Pomodoro Technique - Staying focussed
I’ve been working at home by myself for a few weeks, it’s mostly going well but some days I’m really easily distracted and not as productive as I want to be. As a result, I get unhappy about my days output, which makes me more easily distracted the next day... it’s a vicious cycle.
Anyway, recently while on another engagement, a colleague told me about the Pomodoro technique. Essentially you use a timer to do 25 minute blocks of work where you turn off all interruptions like IM / Email / Twitter, when the timer goes off you give yourself a 5 minute break. Every 4 “pomodoros” you give yourself a longer break. The idea is that 25 minutes gives you enough of that sense of urgency your mind has when under a deadline while giving you a reprieve from it.
Done properly it’s a lot like a mini Scrum. You commit to what you want to do in your 25 minutes, at the end of that look back at the work and decide what you need to move to the next one.
Then you keep track of how long standard tasks take you, what your interruptions are and how you can work with them.
My first day I spent most of today working with the basics, 25 minutes head down and focussed, then 5 minutes to check email, get a drink etc and I got a lot more achieved that day than I did week.
I fell off the wagon with it after a couple of disrupted days with meetings in them, but came back to it this week, and once again found it to be a massive productivity boost.
I found it very helpful to write down a list of all the things I could think of that needed doing, and adding to that list when I thought of something I wanted to do. Once again, this seemed a lot like a Scrum product backlog, and I found that some of the things I’d usually drop what I was doing to look into never really got important enough to include into one of my blocks of work.
There’s a web site and free ebook at the official site, and a nice timer app called Focus Booster that I’ve been using.
Hope it’s helpful to someone else, as someone who often struggles maintaining focus on some of the less interesting tasks I’m finding it to be a great technique.
Comments
Kim Stevens said on 10.24.2009 at 1:46 PM
Hey Damian, nice post. Synchronistically I've been trying out a 'To-Do Scrum' approach for a few weeks, which seems to be working pretty well. I think the brain is happy with it due to positive associations formed from previous experiences using Scrum.
I'm struggling with Pomodoro though - I keep hearing Arnie's voice saying "You lack discipline!" ;-)
Damian said on 10.24.2009 at 3:31 PM
I saw your post a little earlier, I got a chuckle that you, myself and secretgeek all did a similar post on the same day.
I think the Scrum association is where Pomodoro clicked for me. It does take a little bit of discipline, the killer for me is twitter and email, I have to get rid of any alerts from those.
But I work much better under pressure than I do with a long range deadline, so having that 25 minute window to get something done really focuses my mind.
It's interesting stuff.
Mike Minutillo said on 10.24.2009 at 11:46 PM
Hey, I've also started playing with Pomodoro. Being easily distracted I've been looking for ways to stay on target. All I can say is 25 minutes is shorter than I expected. I nearly always bite off more than I can chew and I end up putting tasks off into the next 25 minute session. After doing this for a while I start to feel artificially stressed about not hitting the target. I guess I need to be more pessimistic.
I've been using http://tomatoi.st for my tracking which has been nice and easy. I'll be looking to try again on Monday when I go back to work.
Damian said on 10.25.2009 at 1:11 AM
Hey Mike that site looks cool.
I'm not sure it would work for me, like Secretgeek says :
"Placing an anti-procrastination tool on the internet is like hosting an alcoholics anonymous meeting inside a brewery."
I know what you mean about the 25 minutes being too short sometimes. I found at some points on Friday afternoon I was doing some debugging and found it really hard to stop, because I was in the debugging zone and wanting to beat it. I guess you need to adjust that to suit what you're working on at the time.
I also found that if I finished a task but didn't have long enough to make a decent attempt at the next one I'd stop the clock and have a break early.
Mike Minutillo said on 10.25.2009 at 4:17 AM
You can beat the internet demons with the handy Create Application Shortcuts feature on Chrome to give you a dedicated window for the pomodoro app.
I'd never even considered stopping the clock early. That makes total sense. I'll give it another go on Monday.
Lucy said on 10.27.2009 at 12:04 AM
This is wonderful! I love the fact that I am not the only person out there who is useless with time... I am going to give the Pomodoro Technique a go! starting right now infact. Thanks for the great link.