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My little pomodoro6/10/2023 What almost always happens in practice, of course, is that once I get going, the project sucks me in and I pound happily along, annoyed when I’m “forced” to stop at the end of the work period. It also makes it much easier to psyche myself up for a big hard task, because I know that I can stop in 50 minutes – it’s a real comfort to know that no matter how bad things get, I only have to push for that long and then I get to stop. I think most people find it much easier to work on a project when there are tangible results along the way – I know that I definitely do! You can plan in terms of these chunks of time, you can check them off, and you get a feeling of progress even if there isn’t anything else you can really point to. A multi-week or month project that doesn’t have a lot of interim milestones suddenly has a countable milestone every 50 minutes of work. One of the things I really like about this technique is that it makes an open-ended project quantifiable. In a startup with virtually no meetings, I’m able to get several 50 minute Pomodoros done on a really amazing day, which is an incredibly good feeling. In a multi-tasking environment with meetings and so forth, you might get zero significant blocks of utterly focused, undistracted time. You’ll also be surprised at how few Pomodoros you can really get done. the point is not to beat yourself up, but it is important to be honest with yourself about whether you are really moving ahead on the things that matter, and if not, figure out what to do about it. I got interrupted, or other things came up. If I didn’t get very many Pomodoros checked off that day, I know that I wasn’t able to focus on the projects that I wanted to. The chunks of time are big enough that you can make decisions about them pretty easily.Īt the end of the day, I’ll look at how I did. I find this approach works really well, because it makes it pretty easy to line up my time against the really important priorities. Maybe I’ll spend two of them on machine learning, one designing our user profile system, and one on learning about business metrics for SaaS companies. Check off the Pomodoro when you finish it, and it doesn’t count if you didn’t spend the entire time on your project without stopping.Īt the start of the day, I might decide that my goal is to do (let’s say) four 50-minute Pomodoros. The rest period might be 10 or 15 minutes, or whatever works for you. At the end of the block of time, you stop and get a rest period, where you can deal with things that came up, check email, etc. If anything comes up that you need to attend to, write it down and get right back to work – don’t do anything else about it. You commit to working for that long without stopping – no answering the phone, no getting up, no checking email, no distractions. The guides recommend numbers like 25 minutes I have found that 50 minutes tends to work best for me. The basic idea is that you tackle it in blocks of time, choosing the block size that works for you. Say you have a project that you want to focus on. I do find that it can be overly prescriptive about how you are supposed to use the technique, and my approach is somewhat simpler. There is a detailed online guide, which is well worth looking through. Or, it might be hard because you are trying to create something new, and that can be scary. You just have to bash away at it until you figure out how to get traction (possibly using some of the ideas from the “ crack the nut” post). Often, a project is “hard” because you don’t know what to do. But they aren’t the projects that are going to yield huge amounts of value. It takes very little intellectual effort to update the feature spreadsheet, or answer some emails, or do a QA pass over the website – all fine and useful things to do. A few of them are really important … but the others are often a lot easier. In most jobs, there are a myriad of useful and productive things to work on. This project took hundreds of hours and I just had to chew away at it day after day, working through the algorithms and how we can use them most effectively in our application. For example, I spent a number of weeks diving into the latest techniques in machine learning and figuring out how to apply them to our product. Don’t have clear short-term milestones.It’s so easy to get distracted by easier work or email or interesting discussions with co-workers. Pomodoro is really helpful for doing focused work on important projects, especially when they require creative or deep thinking. The name comes from the Italian word for “tomato”, because the inventor (Francesco Cirillo) had a kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato that he used when he was coming up with it. I’ve been using it quite a bit at our startup, and it’s been a great help, so I thought I’d share it on the blog. A new productivity idea has been making the rounds lately, called the “ Pomodoro” technique.
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