I get distracted very easily – it seems that when I’m in the mindset where I’m trying to think through a problem or I’m laying down lines of code the smallest thing might distract me and I’ll loose my train of thought.
Unfortunately when this happens it seems that it can be really hard to get back on track with the project that I’m working on – in fact I have seen it mentioned that it can take up to 45 minutes for developers to regain their headspace/line of thought when interrupted (see Joel on Software: Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?).
Another problem I face each day is actually building up the motivation to get started on projects. Maybe I’m up to a somewhat monotonous point, or I have to do the administrative minutiae that I really hate – and so, procrastination happens, and continues to happen, and eventually I look at the clock, and the collection of empty coffee cups and wonder where the day has gone to…
I have, however, found a somewhat useful solution for this. The name is The Pomodoro Technique, and I am using is right now to get this post done (not that blogging is monotonous, its just hard to focus when I have an episode of Dexter to watch…).
Pomodoro is (so I have been told) Italian for tomato, and the name come from a kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato. The key part here is the kitchen timer, which would time up to 25 minutes. The creator of the Pomodoro Technique, Francesco Cirillo, originally used this kitchen timer to work in small cycles, no longer then 25 minutes, with a 5 minute break in between each one in order to get the work done.
Why does this work? Think about the most annoying, painful or unpleasant task you have within your day job. This thing could take 5 minutes or 5 hours to do, and you always try to avoid doing it because of how crap it is. The idea behind the Pomodoro Technique is that you can pretty much focus on this unpleasantness for 25 minutes, which gets the ball rolling, and at the end there’s a 5 minute reprise. Basically, if you cant do the job for 25 minutes there’s probably some deeper underlying issues which is causing the lack of motivation or otherwise.
The Pomodoro Technique isn’t a new idea, in fact it has been done before in different ways, but this technique is well documented and has some great supporting tools (timers and so on) to help things move along. There’s even a book available for free which goes through how everything works. If you ask me, free is a great price!
So is there really a secret to all this? Does it flash up some subliminal messages or is there a pill you need to take? No, not really – the main thing is that the stress of ‘time’ has been taken away. Forget deadlines, forget everything else, for the next twenty five minutes just focus on the task at hand. There are some tools, such as Pomodoro for OS X (Mac people…) which I use daily and find very helpful, but really its about letting go and then learning how to work at this rhythm.
Everyone is going to be different, this technique might not even work with you – maybe you don’t even like tomato! I’d suggest trying a few things, try a brain dump by writing down everything on that ‘to do’ list in your head, then pick on, start the timer and work at it for twenty five minutes.
More often then not I’ll find that once I start working on a larger task I’ll almost forget about the timer and work past the time the alarm goes off – if this is the case then why not keep going? The thing you have to remember is that there is no hard and fast rule, just do what works for you.
Hopefully this will help someone out there – I’d love to hear what other people are using for the same kind of thing.
