If you haven’t heard about The Pomodoro Technique and know some Italian. In that case, you may wonder: “Is this a cooking blog?”. But no, I will not talk about the tasty tomatoes (Pomodoro in Italian) today. I will speak of a time management method created by Francesco Cirillo that consists of having deep focus sessions of approximately 25 minutes and a break of 5 minutes. Also, every 4 sessions, a more extended break of 15 minutes. That’s the core of it. To learn more about it, I recommend this blog post about it in the Todoist blog.
The Pomodoro Cycle
So now, each time I use the word “Pomodoro” in this post, I refer to those deep focus sessions. I told you before that they are 25 minutes long, but not necessarily; that’s Francesco’s recommendation. You should use the time that is the best for you. So every 4 pomodoros, we have one cycle. And it looks like this:
- Deep focus pomodoro
- Short break
- Deep focus pomodoro
- Short break
- Deep focus pomodoro
- Short break
- Deep focus pomodoro
- Long break
Using Francesco’s recommended times, every four pomodoros is roughly two hours of work.
Restrictions and limitations
The most important thing is that in the pomodoros, you only do the work. That means no notifications, no emails, no calls, etc.
Another recommendation of this method is to decide which task you will focus on for the next Pomodoro, and you only work on that task. If you finish the job and still have time, keep working on it. They call it “overlearning”. If you need to develop a product feature and finish it in 10 minutes, then you have 15 minutes to improve the code or add more stuff to that feature. Or, if you are researching something, keep exploring until that timer finishes.
Pomodoros are also indivisible. So if you get a critical call in the middle of one… you need to restart that Pomodoro. If you have 15 minutes until your next meeting, you could start one and restart it afterwards, or you could grab a coffee and start from zero. Because it is cheating if you already have 2 pomodoros in and take a more extended break.
How I decided to use pomodoros for myself
I’m not using the Pomodoro Technique at this moment in time. But I did use it not long ago when I found it very hard to focus because of a lack of motivation. I also used it in the university for studying, which I recommend because work meetings are not an issue. So you can be more hardcore on the way to use the methodology.
In my case, I decided to make some rules and be more flexible. Here are the changes I made:
- No notifications that are not related to work. And for the work ones, I decided on a one-to-one basis if they could wait or if I had to take care immediately. And this is very important for people whose principal source of work is email, calls, or alerts on a screen.
- If I finish a task in the middle of a Pomodoro, I go to my task manager and pick the next one. I wouldn’t say I like sticking with a task for 20 minutes if I have already finished it.
- If someone outside of my work calls me in the middle of a pomodoro, I answer and pause the timer. If the call gets too long, I start the cycle from zero. If it is not that long, I unpause the timer.
- Meetings are part of my work, so I keep the Pomodoro timer going when I join one. If the timer finishes, I start the next Pomodoro immediately and accumulate the breaks. That means longer breaks, but I spent more time focused.
And that’s it! The most important message from this post is not how I use the Pomodoro Technique but to be flexible. All these productivity techniques are great, and try to do it correctly when you start using one. But if it is not working for you, or you think tweaking it will make it work better, go ahead! Experiment!