No Time To Exercise, No Dramas
We are all finding it increasingly harder to create a balance between work, family & leisure, but especially our own health & fitness. If you spend any time at all researching life hacks, you’ve probably heard of the famous Pomodoro Technique. Created in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro Technique is one of the more popular time management life hacks used today. But this won’t suit everyone and their situation, and for every person who is a fan of the system, there is another person who is critical of the implementation and results.
Is the Pomodoro Technique right for you? It will come down to a matter of personal preference. This article will break down the basic information you will need to decide if this technique is worth trying out.
What is it?
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.
The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.
Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.
After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.
Every time you finish a pomodoro, you mark your progress with an “X”, and note the number of times you had the impulse to procrastinate or switch gears to work on another task for each 25-minute chunk of time.
How can it help you?
Frequent breaks keep your mind fresh and focused. Pomodoro experts say the system is easy to use and you will see results very quickly: “You will probably begin to notice a difference in your work or study process within a day or two. However true mastery of the technique takes from seven to twenty days of constant use.”
If you have a large and varied 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 you spend procrastinating.
Who loves it?
Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal tried out this system, along with several other similar methods for time management, and said that “It eased my anxiety over the passing of time and also made me more efficient; refreshed by breaks, for example, I halved the total time required to fact-check a column.”
Criticism
Despite the number of Pomodoro-heads out there, the system isn’t without its critics. Colin T. Miller, a Yahoo! employee and blogger, tried using the Pomodoro Technique and had some issues.
“Pomodoros are an all or nothing affair,” he says. “Either you work for 25 minutes straight to mark your X or you don’t complete a pomodoro. Since marking that X is the measurable sign of progress, you start to shy away from engaging in an activity if it won’t result in an X. For instance…meetings get in the way of pomodoros. Say I have a meeting set for 4:30pm. It is currently 4:10pm, meaning I only have 20 minutes between now and the meeting…In these instances I tend to not start a pomodoro because I won’t have enough time to complete it anyway.”
Conclusion
One of the best things about the Pomodoro Technique is that it’s free and easy to incorporate. Yeah, it might take some time to set yourself up by using any timer program on your computer or phone. So even if you try it and hate it, you haven’t lost any cash.
The process isn’t ideal for every person, or in any line of work. But if you need a systematic way to tackle your daily to-do list, the Pomodoro Technique may fit your needs. You can use an online task list like Wunderlist to set your to-do list.
