Pomodoro and time management
This is a re-post from my old blog.
When you have a lot of tasks to do, apart from prioritizing them to complete the most important first, you’ll want to optimize the time you need for any of them.
Several features to complete at work, a personal project to complete, maybe while you have to do housework as well. You need discipline. But you’re human and you get tired. One of my favourite sayings is: “Work smarter, not harder”.
You would think that working 10 hours without breaks is very productive. Well, it is not. After only a day you will be doing a fraction of what you could, if you worked in the right way.
The question is about how to focus really well on your current task, so to spend the least energies you can on it. It requires an overwhelming discipline to just say “I have to concentrate” and to do it. I am no Tibetan monk so I need to prepare the right conditions to do it easily.
This can be done by setting some simple rules taken by the Pomodoro technique. I am not using the full set of recommendations, but the only the main ones.
Take a good Pomodoro application or better a kitchen alarm, set it to 25 minutes and start working on your task. No talking, no emails, no chat, only think about your current task. Asynchronous communication is very useful at work, as you can postpone your answers.
When the alarm rings, take a 5 minutes break. I said break! You have completed a Pomodoro. No talking or thinking about anything more complicated than the sun at Maldives. At most some email or chat answering, if it’s not too hard.
Every 4 Pomodoros take a 15 minutes break. Now compare how you feel after 12 pomodoros to how you feel after 6 plain hours, and how much work you did. Better isn’t it? More work, done with less energy.
To complement this, it’s better to not switch projects in between the daily hours, so you can focus only on one matter. It takes overhead to switch continuously from task to task: we eliminated it during the 25 minutes, let’s scale to the entire day.
This is a principle suggested by Kanban, an agile framework that reminds of the importance of constraints on WIP (Work In Progress). You have all your to-dos organized by priority, state etc. Just do them one at a time. Human brain is not done for multitasking!
