The forgotten pomodoros
TO-MA-TOES
Productivity hacks.
They are legion, numerous - multiplying and dispersing as a hive of little crawling bugs, adapted to all kind of savoury sauces. Flying away through self help books, blogs, talks and articles (I help to spread some too !). And in the end, very few survive the hardship of reality.
Nobody relies on a dozen different tricks to be efficient, motivated or disciplined. And things that worked before may simply feel irrelevant five years later.
It's a bit how I felt with pomodoros. I must have learnt about them nearly ten years ago. I was working as a database developer and engineer at the time, and they did help me to enforce three/four dense hours of coding every morning and afternoon, on a daily basis (provided I could avoid the pointless meetings that plague the worklifes of us all). It really prevented me to ping-pong along mails and prioritize the right tasks.
Then COVID happened. At some point, I kind of gave up timing work chunks while working at home (I had no productivity problem - I just slowly fell off this particular wagon). And I forgot about the tomato-timer trick.
Since the beginning of this year has been marked by deep reflections about my own working habits, I stumbled upon pomodoros again. I am no stranger to planning and time-boxing. My Notion calendar lives on my desktop without paying any rent. But I had doubts about my ongoing capacity to code and stay acutely focused on Lampyre for multiple hours.
So I thought, why not giving the technique another chance? It's even quicker to set up than habit tracking - just set any timer on 25 minutes and focus up. I grabbed eatgrass's neat Obsidian plug-in and I've been using it consistently for a dozen days.
Feels good to be wrong
I expected nothing and was still surprised by the reliable effects of the method.
25 minutes never feel too long or too daunting. This time span lets you get started on the most repulsive tasks - even if you're exhausted. And it is a reasonable length to achieve something productive - with the exception of some particularly complex subjects that would rather need something like sixty to ninety minutes without any pause.
Despite the fact I already practiced pomodoros years before, and like many other people, I was afraid that taking a five minutes break every half an hour would destroy my capacity to keep concentrated. I found it does not - for two simple reasons.
- Five minutes elapse quickly. I use these to clear my mind and breathe deeply. Sometimes I jot down distracting thoughts onto an Obsidian note to deal with them later. The idea here is to not jump on a Youtube video or text messages just because you have a few minutes to spare.
Using this method, I can swiftly resume my focus and I tire a lot less through the day. It's sustainable attention. I end up producing much, much more valuable work than if I tried to plow through all these five minutes pauses.
Feels a bit similar to meditation, where seemingly doing "nothing productive" for just five minutes can save you hours of distractedness and procrastination in the day.
- You may originally think it's dumb to follow a set timer to stay productive. Of course I can work without any interruptions for ninety minutes, LOL. Except that in reality, I rarely did for the past month. And sometimes, even when you think you're being productive, flow slips away approaching the forty or sixty minutes mark and you find yourself much more distracted than if you used some pomodoros. They'll be almost useless to someone already championing multiple hours of work - but they're an excellent tool to any frazzled mind.
When I've been deeply focused for a reasonable amount of time, I tend to think I deserve a break - which is true. But occasionally, the hard earned respite transforms into a two hours video game session. Not the schedule I tried to enforce when I planned the day this morning.
The timed pauses coupled with some interstitial journaling completely stopped my procrastination relapses. Instead of automatically opening twitch, reddit or discord servers, I stop for two minutes and think about what I'm doing, and why, with a few written lines (Obsidian or physical journal - it does not matter). The Bullet Journal website has a neat article and video explaining this.
All in all, I'll assuredly keep using pomodoros for quite some time to structure my work days. Maybe I'll tweak up the sessions' lengths if I feel my focus is rock solid and I need less breaks.
If you're hesitant to try it, the sheer protection against notifications and distractions have wonderful effects on your productivity (and your well being, honestly). Work done faster means plentiful and guilt free leisure time !