The Pomodoro Technique

Time is free, but it's priceless. you cannot own it but you can use it. You cannot keep it but you can spend it and once it's lost you can never get it back.

I often procrastinate because I used to believe that my project or task was too big to finish. The task can be anything like responding to important emails from clients for a working person or finishing an exercise from your Maths textbook for a student. As a frequent sufferer of procrastination, I always wanted to combat this issue. Gladly being an Amal Fellowship fellow, I got to learn amazing performance-enhancing skills. This week I got to know about the Pomodoro technique.

But what exactly is a Pomodoro technique??

The theory involved here states that any large task or a series of tasks can be split into shorter time intervals called Pomodoros. Each Pomodoro is separated by a short break. This takes advantage of the fact that our brains have limited attention spans. No matter how strong our IQ is, the concentration on work decreases with time. Here, this framework for productivity forces you to focus on one thing at a time, thus leaving less room for procrastination.

1. Choose a task to be accomplished.
2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is fine)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break and after finishing the task reward yourself.

How I used the technique?

So I was getting really distracted in my Project Work 4 and I decided to implement the Pomodoro technique to help me get on with it. I set alarm for 25 minutes and I started watching all the videos and answering all the reflection questions. Few distractions popped into my mind like my friends calling me to play and random youtube videos popping in my head, I wrote those down and immediately got back to my work.

Then I gave myself a break and I gave myself a stretch and got up and walked around. Getting back to work I was able to finish more than half of the first course in astonishing time. I gave myself the other break and drank some water, cause hydration is the key, lol.

My course was completed and I felt really good cause I always felt like it took me a lot of time to complete tasks/assignments cause I kept getting distracted.

My experience with Pomodoro was really good because

1- Listing your tasks in their own right is a good organizational technique.

2- Breaking down your task into Pomodoro's so you practice estimating the length of tasks in manageable chunks. This makes you think about whether you need to break down tasks further and also if you get it wrong, it helps you to estimate better in the future — it makes the process quantifiable.

3- By doing a defined number of Pomodoro's in a day you do not overwork or underwork, and you help yourself to become more consistent and dependable.

Watch as you mindfully see your productivity rise, while others mindlessly think they are being effective without any means by which to know whether this is true or not. It’s worth a try — give it a go for a week and see how you feel about it.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it — Michealangelo