In a recent three-part series of posts, I took a deep dive into the subject of attention, focus, and distraction and the three human attentional systems. This is important information for anyone who (like consultants) needs to be maximally productive with their work time.
To catch up on all the ins and outs of how our attentional systems work and how to maximize them, you can check out those posts:
“The Three Types of Attention and Why You Must Master Them to Achieve Consulting Success (Part 1),” about arousal (our alerting and orienting network).
“The Three Types of Attention and Why You Must Master Them to Achieve Consulting Success (Part 2),” about the focused attention system.
“The Three Types of Attention and Why You Must Master Them to Achieve Consulting Success (Part 3),” about the stimulus-driven attention system.
The whole point of learning about attention and focus is to achieve, more often and more consistently, the state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow” in his landmark book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
“Flow” can be defined as a state in which one is able to focus deeply and effortlessly on one’s work, forgetting everything else. Obviously, this is a state consultants need to be able to get into regularly.
Today, I want to share with you one of the best time management tips you’ll ever learn—the Pomodoro Technique. We’ll look at what it is and how to employ it in your work routine to get into flow quickly and stay in flow for specified chunks of time in order to get more work done.
Is the Pomodoro Technique for You?
Before I explain where the Pomodoro Technique came from and how to use it, I want to give you a quick checklist to determine whether this technique is something that would be beneficial to you (I’d hate to waste your time).
So, here’s a list of the kinds of people who can benefit most from using the Pomodoro Technique:
- People who are easily distracted—The Pomodoro Technique gives you a goal to maintain focus for a pre-determined period of time. Simply having this goal is often enough to keep you from giving in to the temptation to yield to distractions in your work environment that threaten to pull you away from your task.
- People who have trouble with procrastination—If you often need a “kick in the seat of the pants” to get down to work (or to get down to work on that particular task you’ve been avoiding), this technique can help you get started by dividing the task into “bite-sized pieces” so it doesn’t look so daunting.
- People who often work past the point of optimal productivity—If you’re the opposite of the person who can’t sit still and put in the work, if you’re instead the kind of person who will try to grind through several hours of work without taking a break and who often finds that the quality of your work dips the longer you go, this technique can maximize your unit of work done per unit of time by keeping you fresher and more mentally sharp.
- People who have frequent open-ended projects that could take an unlimited amount of time—If you have large projects that are ongoing, like writing a book or creating an online course, the Pomodoro Technique can help by breaking the large task down into more manageable chunks.
- People who are overly optimistic when planning their day’s work—If you regularly make a to-do list that runs off the bottom of the page and end up never getting it all done, that can wear on you, making it feel like you’re never being as productive as you’d like. Regular practice of the Pomodoro Technique teaches you how many chunks of time (pomodoros) all of your regular tasks take to complete. Armed with this knowledge, you can start making to-do lists that are much more accurate and achievable. And when you check off that final item of the day, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment instead of focusing on what you didn’t get done.
- People who enjoy “gamifying” their work by setting and achieving goals—If you like to set small goals for yourself to achieve during your work day, this technique is perfect for you. You can try to get more pomodoros completed in a day than you did on the previous day, or you can challenge yourself to get a task done within the time constraints of a designated number of pomodoros. These additional “mini-goals” can be a great help in keeping you focused.
The Pomodoro Technique: History
The Pomodoro Technique was developed in late 1980s by then university student Francesco Cirillo, who was struggling to focus on his studies and complete assignments. Desperate to get more work done, he set a goal to focus for 10 minutes at a time without a break.
To enforce his work periods, he found a simple kitchen timer. The one he initially used was shaped like a tomato, thus giving the name to the technique (“pomodoro” is Italian for “tomato”).
Cirillo later wrote the book, The Pomodoro Technique: The Life-Changing Time-Management System about it and built out an entire consultancy business based on his time management strategies. For more detail on Cirillo’s ideas, see his website.
How the Pomodoro Technique Works
Now that you know who the Pomodoro Technique is for and a little bit about its origins, let’s break down how it works. Here are the steps:
- Pick a task from your to-do list.
- Set a timer for 25 minutes of work and focus on that single task for the duration. (Cirillo tried different periods of time for his pomodoros and eventually settled on 25 minutes as optimal.)
- When the timer goes off, take a 5-minute break.
- After four pomodoros, take a longer 15-30 minute break.
There are a number of tweaks you can apply to this basic formula, but that’s the gist of it. It really is that simple.
Here are a few additional rules for making the technique work for you:
- Break down complex projects into chunks if they take longer than four pomodoros. This helps you focus on each part and gives you a sense of progress.
- Small tasks go together. Combine simple tasks that take less than 25 minutes together into a single pomodoro.
- Once a pomodoro is set, it must ring. Think of a pomodoro as an indivisible unit of time that can’t be broken—especially not to do “busy work” such as check e-mails or check your social media accounts on your phone. In the case of an unavoidable disruption, take a five-minute break and start again.
- If you finish your task before the pomodoro ends, you must switch tasks to finish the pomodoro. For this, I like to have an “overflow task” at hand for such occasions. My favorite overflow activity is to keep whatever business book I’m currently reading within arm’s reach so I can pop into it where I left off and make a little progress on it before the timer goes off.
Why the Pomodoro Technique Works
There are several reasons the technique helps people be more productive.
For one thing, most people tend to underestimate how long it will take to do most tasks. And then when we don’t get as much done as we wanted to, we feel like we were unproductive and we feel bad about it. With the Pomodoro technique, each time we complete a Pomodoro, we feel a sense of accomplishment. The focus shifts from what we didn’t get done to what we did get done.
Another strength of the technique is that it’s objective as opposed to subjective. When we spend 30 minutes clicking around on social media, it can sometimes feel like five minutes because it’s all fun and games. Conversely, 30 minutes of research for an article might feel like an hour. But a pomodoro is 25 minutes, no matter what you’re doing, and you can’t fool yourself.
The technique also gives you a productivity goal that’s a challenge yet is achievable (another condition that Csikszentmihalyi identified as a prerequisite for the flow experience). You may be struggling with your current work task, but you can tell yourself, “Hey, it’s just 25 minutes. I can push through this, and then I get a break.”
Finally, once you get a better feel for how much you can get done in each of your pomodoros, you can become more realistic and effective at planning your days. Take 15 minutes at the beginning of your day to plan the day’s work or at the end of the day to plan the next day’s work. Assign the number of pomodoros you think it will take to complete each task on your list. At the end of the day, look back over your day and see where you estimates were off. Then adjust for the next day’s plan.
Become a Time Management Pro Starting Today
If you’ve been just kind of working through your days without any real plan or system, being driven from one task to another by the urgency of upcoming deadlines and feeling unproductive and stressed, adding the Pomodoro Technique to structure your work days is one of the simplest, yet transformational strategies you can employ.
And one of the nicest things about it is that no training is necessary. You don’t have to read a book, or take a course, or visit Cirillo’s website. Sure, there’s a lot more nuance you can add to the technique once you get going (I’ll cover some of those nuances in an upcoming post), but all you need to get started is right here in this post.
So give it a try. I think you’ll be blown away by the results.
And let me hear from you. Just drop a comment in the box below about your experiences.
