Working from home can be a really interesting experience. You're doing everything you can
to be productive and manage your time well. But let's be honest, you keep getting distracted
by the smallest things and you find yourself procrastinating before you set out to complete
the tasks that you needed to. Everything happening in the world right now has required a lot
of us to maintain some degree of social distancing and in many cases caused companies to close
their doors temporarily and ask employees to work from home. And people are figuring
out how to go about doing this. So I want to share with you a technique that might be
the answer to you getting more out of your time working from home, especially when the
environment and things are happening in the world might not be the most conducive to you
getting your work done. So allow me to introduce you to the Pomodoro Technique.
The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity philosophy that was developed in the late 1980s by Francesco
Cirillo who used a tomato shaped kitchen timer or Pomodoro to divide workup into intervals
and an effort to be more productive. Splitting work into intervals with regular breaks has
been widely thought to allow for more focus and flow, thereby allowing one to complete
projects faster with less mental fatigue. This is probably one of the simplest productivity
methods to implement, especially when you have a shorter attention span like me and
function best with quick bursts of productivity like me. All you'll need is a regular kitchen
timer or even the timer on your phone. The process is simple. Choose a task to be accomplished.
Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes. Work on that task until the Pomodoro rings and then put
a check mark on your sheet of paper. Once that 25 minutes is up, take a short break.
Five minutes should be fine and every four Pomodoros take a longer break, 15 to 30 minutes,
whatever you feel you need. Now, when I gave this a shot, I kept getting distracted by
random thoughts in my head, like what someone's diet must be like to require this much toilet
paper. Or who would really buy a $350 bottle of hand sanitizer. But my recommendation would
be to write down these distractions. So you can think about them later and instead focus
on the task at hand. Also, try to keep your phone on silent. You're going to have to reset
the timer if you answer your phone. All right, so if you have a large and very to do list,
using the Pomodoro Technique can help you crank through projects faster by forcing you
to adhere to strict timing. Watching the timer wind down can spur you to wrap up your current
task more quickly and spreading a task over two or three Pomodoros can keep you from getting
frustrated.
The constant timing of your activities makes you more accountable for your tasks and minimizes
the time that you spend procrastinating. The stages of planning, tracking, processing,
and visualizing are fundamental to this technique, but so is the sense of urgency that a ticking
clock can bring. A hack that I used was to keep everything that I needed to do the task
at an arm's length from me so that I wouldn't have to get up in the middle of a session.
With regard to the breaks at the end of each Pomodoro, I recommend using your five minutes
to get a glass of water or use the bathroom or even walk around. In my experience though,
I found that I prefer to skip my break and work through it if I'm in a state of flow.
This is where I think you should feel free to break the rules a little bit if you've
got your creative juices flowing since it can be hard to find your flow or even start
the work in the first place.
Now, you don't need to have a tomato shaped timer like this to use the Pomodoro Technique.
The timer on your phone should be enough to do the job. There's also an app called Tide,
which is designed for you to use this method and even plays ambient music to help you focus.
I'll link that in the description below.
All in all, I found that the Pomodoro Technique allowed me to keep track of the things I needed
to get done, and most importantly, get me into the head space where I could focus on
a task so that I could easily get it out of the way. So I hope that you guys find this
helpful because during this time we're all trying to do the best that we can and stay
productive. Thank you so much for watching. Wash your hands. Stay safe, and I'll see you
soon.