John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I’ve done a couple of videos on using the Pomodoro Technique and I’ve talked about
this a lot.
You can find sort of my weekly planning, I’ve got a video here where you can see where I—I
plan my week.
It’s called How I Plan My Week.
What I use is a technique called the Pomodoro Technique for a lot of what I do which is
basically you set a timer for 20 minutes, you work and focus on one task for 20 minutes
and then you take a 5 minute break or 25 minutes actually and then take a 5 minute break and
then you repeat that and that’s one Pomodoro.
You can kind of build your entire schedule for your day based off of that.
I plan off of that.
But a lot of people say, “Okay, John, that’s fine.
You work from home.
You sit at your desk and you can close your office door and you can just get to work,
but what about—how does this work in the working environment and in an 8-hour work
day?
How do I actually get this done?”
I got this question from Philip and he says, “How does the Pomodoro Technique map for
a full time 8-hour work day?
I know getting 10 Pomodoros a day is an exhausting thing so how are you supposed to survive a
day in the office?”
There’s a couple of things that I recommend.
First of all, one of the big arguments again in being able to do this is that you can’t
just close your door and work for 25 minutes uninterrupted.
Well, a lot of times what you can do is you can let your boss and coworkers know what
you’re planning on doing and that you’re trying to be more productive.
If you tell them ahead of time and just say, “Look, I’m going to put a sign on my cubicle
that says that I’m working on a Pomodoro and when that sign is active please don’t
bother me, don’t interrupt me.
The worst case you have to wait 25 minutes and then I’ll come and find you and you
just pop your head in the door, send me an email.”
I think most environments they’re going to be okay with that especially when you start
being really productive and you present it in the right way that you want to be more
productive and explain why this works, even send them, show them my video of how I plan
my week and say that you want to start doing this, you want to produce more.
It’s really hard for me to see an employer argue against that.
Then comes the actual execution of this.
You want to figure out first of all a realistic amount of Pomodori that you’re going to
be able to get done in a day at work.
Like I said, 10 Pomodori a day is about 5 hours of solid work.
That’s probably an aggressive goal to shoot for.
I think I would start with 8.
If you could do 4 solid hours of focused work in a day that’s going to be pretty good
and you’re going to find that really, really hard to do actually.
What I would recommend that you start out doing at work is that you just start trying
to do as many as you can during the day and start tracking that and track it for a week
and see how many you’re getting done and then set a goal based on that.
You’re going to have to maybe rearrange your schedule, right?
Maybe you cancel some meetings, maybe you try to work in blocks of time, but that’s
going to give you an idea.
If you realize you’re only getting 2 or 3 done a day that’s a problem, right?
Maybe you set a goal of 6 per day and you figure out how to do that.
Once you start hitting that goal then you can raise that number higher and higher and
you can figure out the things that are stopping you, right?
You’re going to find that.
Yeah, going jumping on your email or jumping on Facebook or context switching between different
tasks is costing you time and then you’re not able to get as much work done.
I think that’s where I would start.
Eventually you can get up to a point where maybe you’re doing 10 Pomodori a day.
If you’re doing more than that that’s—it’s not going to be very likely, right?
But maybe you could, maybe you could do more than that.
Make sure tough you leave some time for yourself to be able to work on stuff after work or
before work, a couple of Pomodori to build and advance your own stuff and develop your
own career or build your side business as I always talk about as well.
Anyway, it can be done in a work environment.
It takes time.
It’s not easy to do but if you’re willing to explain to people what you’re doing and
why you’re doing it and you’re willing to get this going and to do the steps to get
your Pomodoros done during the day, I think you’ll find a huge, huge benefit from this.
As I talked about in my Soft Skills book most people really in a work spend about 2 hours
working so that’s 4 Pomodori and they’re not focused.
Track your stuff and watch.
The first week track yourself and watch how little time that you actually spend focused
and working on a single task and you’ll be amazed and then you’ll see the benefit.
I mean you can—using the technique at work, honestly, you can double, triple or maybe
quadruple your output.
It’s going to be hard but it’s also just—it’s good practice.
It’s a good habit to develop to be able to be focused and working hard.
We waste a lot of time on stuff that isn’t productive and when you start applying this
technique especially at work you’re going to see how much time you’re wasting and
then you’re going to be able to get back some of that time.
Anyway, I hope this helps you.
If you have a question about Pomodoros or how I apply this definitely you can email
me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
If you like this video definitely subscribe to the channel.
Take care.