[Training] How to Focus Using the Pomodoro Technique®
Since staying focused while working from home (and on the road) is still very much a reality today, this blog was updated on February 26, 2023.
Watch the 55-minute replay of this March 18, 2020, training presented by Stacey Harmon. Stacey has been working remotely for more than a decade. She’s also an Evernote Certified Expert and GTD Practitioner.
How to Focus Using the Pomodoro Technique®
Supporting handout: harmonenterprises.com/pomodoro
This training was recorded when the world first began dealing with a pandemic. In 2020, virtual work became the new norm. Even if you’re still in a hybrid situation, focusing at home is crucial for your productivity.
It’s helpful to remember that there’s only so much we can control. And, we can control ourselves, our thoughts, and our focus on – in other words, our attention.
"Attention isn’t scalable. Be selective about what you choose to focus your attention on. Our perception is our reality, and perception is a downstream sub-system. Attention comes first, so protect it" - André Chaperone
I love that last part - “Attention comes first, so protect it.”
That’s what The Pomodoro Technique® is designed to do. It’s a powerful tactic that you can apply to sharpen your focus and get anything done, no matter what you’re facing.
In this replay of this training that was given on March 18, 2020, you’ll:
Discover what The Pomodoro Technique is
Learn Pomodoro best practices and how to adapt them to your needs so you can increase your focus
Receive Evernote templates to complement your Pomodoro practice
Get access to curated resources for using the Pomodoro technique to get things done!
Transcript of training by Stacey Harmon:
Welcome to How to focus on Uncertain Times with the Pomodoro Technique.
My name is Stacey Harmon and welcome to this hour long webinar, where I'm going to show you some items, that – hopefully – you can apply immediately to help improve your focus in these very uncertain times that we're having.
I always like to start by introducing myself. I’m an Evernote Certified Consultant and Evernote Regional Leader and my business Harmon Enterprises is focused around solving your productivity problems with Evernote. Here’s a quick list of my products. You can go to my Harmon Enterprises website at any time to learn more about them. My products aren’t the focus of this presentation. But I do want you to know that I am focused on productivity all of the time in my business, and it's one of the reasons that I felt I could benefit or help you all with this particular topic because it's something I personally use.
I do invite you also to follow me on instagram and twitter @StaceyHarmon. Those are my top two channels, where I'll post additional trainings as I choose to do them or productivity techniques. Take a look around the use of Evernote and the hashtag #EvernoteCommunity is a great way to kind of stay in touch with me and the greater Evernote community.
There is a handout for this particular presentation and it is on the bottom of every single slide. And it's harmonenterprises.com/pomodoro. And what you're going to do is just go there and, if you don't use Evernote, you can print that out or you can select all and copy and paste it into Google Docs or whatever your channel of choice is. If you're an Evernote user, you can go ahead and save that directly to your Evernote account. It lists all links and resources that I'm going to mention throughout this presentation. So you don't have to write them down or scribble them down really quickly. You have access to all of that through that link.
And one of the things that obviously is not going to surprise you too much is that because I am an Evernote Certified Consultant, my top productivity and focus tool is Evernote. So as you can see from their homepage, their positioning is “focus on what matters to you”, it is a key part of my overall productivity practice.
But it's not what I'm going to be talking about today and I'm going to show you where this fits into my overall productivity practice, and how the Pomodoro Technique overlaps with Evernote through example, as we go through this.
What I think is more important for you guys to know about me, is that I've worked from home for 10 years.So this meme was, I thought very, very funny. Because it's, I saw it and I said, “Yeah, that's about what life feels like right now”. And I work from home. And I've had to learn a lot of these focus skills that I'm going to share with you through self directed work challenges that I've had for many years.
So I'm going to synthesize it down into a one hour training that is one of the core skills that I use, which is the Pomodoro Technique and let me show you where it fits into my overall productivity practice.
Here’s a very high level of my productivity practice. And I'll show you where we're going to focus this hour long time together. So my general work from home strategy and how I work to stay productive and focused is that, number one, I manage my energy. And by the way, this is what I've done for years. And I'm finding that this is even more important in our current environment.
First is I manage my energy versus my time. So for example, if I can't sleep, I'd give myself permission to work, even if it's 3am. I woke up at 4am yesterday for no reason I couldn't sleep and I said, screw it, I'm just going to get to work and be productive. And on the flip side, if I need to take a nap, I take a nap even if it's 10am, which is not typical nap time for me. So, I just give myself that mental permission. And this has been a huge help to me in my work from home lifestyle.
The second thing is I manage my focus, I proactively manage my focus. The first is media management. More so now than ever care. If the TV is on or not in the morning – prior to the pandemic I used to have the TV on for 30 minutes in the morning just as background noise to kind of get caught up on the day. I'm finding that's not productive for my focus right now. It's not the time I choose to do it. I'm turning music on. So media management is a proactive decision that I'm making.
The second thing is I am a GTD’er, this is a book called Getting Things Done by a guy named David Allen, you'll hear me mention a couple of the concepts here and you can learn much more about it at my website. I have a full GTD book club that's free.
This is a great time to kind of get involved and read that book along with me if you find that that might help your own personal productivity practice. But his tagline is “Th Art of Stress Free Productivity.” And I really have experienced that as a result of my GTD practice which I do inside Evernote and GTD is used to establish and manage my priorities and my day to day life, as well as what is on my brain and I used Now Evernote as my digital desk to manage my GTD practice.
But within that, within managing my priorities through GTD, I use the Pomodoro technique, which is in red here because this is going to be the entire content of today's presentation, to manage distractions and make progress on those priorities that I determined. So whether or not you use GTD, you're gonna have priorities, and this Pomodoro Technique, you're gonna be able to apply to executing on those and managing distractions around them.
This for me, though, I wanted to lay out that the intersection for me is between GTD is my to do list and I manage my and execute on my priorities using the Pomodoro Technique. That’s how I make progress on them.
And then a third part, which I am going to address at the very end because it's really important, is I rely on community. And I've had to build this even in a work from home environment and it's now even more virtual in order to cope. Also, a couple of tech tools that have always been important or norm have now become essential. Tools like FaceTime and Zoom – we're using Zoom here in order to virtually connect.
Plus, virtual communities. I'm gonna give you a couple of resources on that. And then, new to my whole world, are these new virtual coffee and happy hour “dates” as I call them, meeting up with friends and my connections, one on one virtually in order to interact and manage and stay positive.
So that's kind of my overall high level structure for staying productive and focused.
You can see where the Pomodoro Technique fits in there. So something I've practiced for years, and I'm going to discuss much more with you.
But what really prompted me to do this webinar is that about two weeks ago, I went to Philadelphia with two entrepreneur friends of mine and we went on a work writing retreat, and we got a big Airbnb and we were sitting there and this was right before the pandemic hit – like SXSW got canceled a couple of days after I returned, so It was coming. But people were still traveling. And we sat there. And we worked in the Pomodoro, to do our own work during our retreat. And I brought that tool to the table for the three of us to work on. And they both had heard of it before, but neither of them actually practiced it.
And it's interesting, because what I wanted to point out was Brit, who's sitting on the left there, in some chats that we had after the retreat, was suddenly reporting that she now was pomodoro’ing, and she's found it game changing?
And then she said a little later “I used to know what it was. Yes, I definitely needed to experience to have an impact on me.”
So I want you guys to take away from this session that I'm going to tell you all about it. You're gonna have to try it in order to see if it's going to work for you. But immediately she was seeing results and benefits and Jacq said the same thing as well.
And so, she's known about it for years. And she kind of got it, but she didn't think it would make a difference. But then she did it. And it really did. And that this is my favorite part. Because I think we can all relate here. This was just yesterday, she texted and said she literally can't work without the Pomodoro Technique right now. And the reason is, it's the one little thing she can control why everything burns around her. So how many of us are feeling a little bit this way? And I'm hopeful that if she can experience this so quickly, you can too. Alright, so with that page being or that foundation being set, I think this has a lot of value. And hopefully you can experience that as well.
Let's get into what is the Pomodoro Technique. You can learn all about it at PomodoroTechnique.com, but it is basically a time management method developed in the 80s based around the Italian word for tomato and this tomato timer. It's a time boxing technique developed by Francesco Cirillo, and he has a book about it that you can buy. It's about 140 pages. There's a link in the handout for you as well. And he used to have a free PDF guide, you see that on the right there, he, I don't think that it's widely available anymore. It's what I originally got oriented to, in order to learn the Pomodoro Technique and what I based this presentation off of, but now he's converted into a for sale product. So you can try googling free Pomodoro Technique PDF, if you want to look for it online, but the book is a $10 book on Amazon, you can get all the details if this kind of thing interests you.
However, what I’ve done here is summarize what they put out there publicly on the website and from the workbook.
And he states that the goals of the Pomodoro Technique are basically to provide a simple tool or process for improving productivity which is able to do the following.
alleviate anxiety linked to the passing of time,
enhance focus and calm.
concentration by cutting down on interruptions,
increased awareness of your decisions boosts motivation (we could all use a little of that)
bolster the determination to achieve your goals.
refine the estimation process, both in qualitative and quantitative terms,
improve your work or study process
strengthen your determination to keep on applying yourself in the face of complex situations like,
Doesn't this sound like what we all need right through this simple timeboxing technique? So how do we do it? There's actually a core process, it's six steps.
These are the six steps and this is the structure that the presentation is going to take. I'm going to go through each of these and give you kind of the key points as well as some tips about how I apply this within Evernote and how you can apply it within Evernote if you want to do it within Evernote as well.
So let's start with step one. And by the way, this screenshots in your handout also, which again, the URL is on the lower right hand corner, every slide.
All right, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to choose a task You would like to get done. So as he states in the guide, you want to choose something big, something small, something you've been putting off for a million years, it does not matter. What matters is it something that deserves your full undivided attention.
So here's what you need to do, you need to define what it is you're going to do, and you need to write it down.
Now in the classic Pomodoro Technique, he tells you to write it down on something called a To Do Today Sheet. If you use other productivity techniques, for example, you're a member of my EverDone program which is my GTD and Evernote product and community. We use the daily task management note.
If you're a bullet journaler, you might log this on your daily log tracker.
The concept is you want to write it down. And you want to track it in a way you can. I'm going to focus on the first two techniques right for today's presentation. You also want to plan or estimate or guess how many pomodoros you think it's going to take you to get through that task.
Now, the guide specifically defines that you want to break up any task that has more than five to seven estimated pomodoro hours to complete. If it's too big, you want to break it down. And then you also conversely, want to group simple tasks that are related so that they can combine a minimum combined equate to a minimum of one pomodoro.
So an example would be instead of emailing my mom back, which would be a really simple task, it's not gonna take me 25 minutes, I might instead have a pomodoro of email responses. So I'm gonna batch those group items together, and I'm gonna spend a whole pomodoro doing email communications.
All right, and let's look at what this will look like in Evernote. I provided a template in the handout that you see there on the left, and it mirrors very closely the Pomodoro roster that he has you print out. You can see that there's a simple grid and I put some directions in there, you can get rid of those directions if you like.
Let’s say that you've decided that you have three tasks right there. Maybe you decided to sign up for one of my courses, and it's a two hour course. So that's going to take four pomodoro. So you're gonna put four different checkboxes there, you're going to do some email replies, and you're going to do some meal planning, okay? Those are your choices about what you're going to accomplish today. And you've estimated how many pomodoro they're going to have. Now if you're in my EverDone program, or you GTD in Evernote (I know there's several of you who are involved in that but are watching the call), I have a similar process for it. I use the checkbox to designate multiple pomodoro rows, and I would break it up on the daily task management note, as you see on the right. And that's step one, you simply have to log it and estimate how long it's going to take you.
For step two, you're going to set pomodoro for 25 minutes.
So let's talk about the Pomodoro – the actual timer. And before I do that, it's really important in the guide, he says, make a small oath to yourself. That's actually a really key concept that I don't want to gloss over. David Allen talks about this too, about these agreements that we make with ourselves, when we say yes to something, or we tell ourselves that we're going to accomplish something, and then we don't, those are broken agreements, they have really strong consequences and undermining our system. And they talk about it here in the Pomodoro Technique.
It's one of the ways GTD and the Pomodoro overlap. You want to make a small oath to yourself, “I will spend 25 minutes on this task, and I will not interrupt myself. You can do it after all, it's just 25 minutes.” So they give you a little cheer there.
Now let's talk about the timer. You. It's an essential part of the program. You need to have a timer. There's tons of free timers out there. There's lots of paid ones too. I've given you some options that I'm going to talk about here. They're all linked to in the handout.
Your pomodoro timer:
It should be your physical workspace. So it should be digital on your phone, which is near you or on your computer or physically sitting next to you. And there's a couple of characteristics of the timer that are called out as essential, it should clearly show you how much time is left in the Pomodoro.
It should make a ticking sound. You should have an audible ticking sound and it should ring when the time is up. And a lot of people will push back on the ticking. And you may be annoyed by that. The evidence shows that in time, over time, the ticking actually becomes calming. And it's a sound that signals you're in the working zone. So it's kind of like this Pavlovian technique that you teach yourself. And I personally experienced this when I went through learning the Pomodoro Technique. It's really resistant to that tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, it was like anxiety inducing. However over time now it's like boom, it zaps you right into that focus, and it becomes a really key part of the program. So I encourage you to try doing it for three, four days using the ticking and seeing if you have a shift in how you view that sound. And sometimes though there's others in the room, especially now we've got more people in our physical spaces, we're home and quite self quarantining this kind of thing can, you might need to adjust, you can either recruit them to join you in your Pomodoro technique that would be one of their preferred options, or convert your pomodoro ticking to visual cues maybe it's a moving watch hands on a digital timer or a blinking or maybe a vibration on your watch when it when it completes something along those lines.
You could have a physical pomodoro timer. In fact, the guide advises that this is the best solution. You can go with a traditional pomodoro or timer in the shape of a fruit or a tomato, a digital one. They both exist in ample forms. I use a digital timer on my particular computer.
There's lots of free ones, you can search the App Store for pomodoro timers also, but I particularly like and my personal choice on my computer is the Pomodoro app, mostly because as you can see in the screenshot on the left, it integrates with a lot of third party tools, including Evernote. So it allows me to actually track how many pomodoro is against particular notes in my account, which can equate to different projects and projects that I'm managing. I also really love the different setting configurations and the sounds that I can turn on or off or adjust. I find it really user friendly. And there's a link for 20% off of that particular tool in the handout, if that interests you. I love that it integrates with Evernote so that's kind of useful. A big reason I use that particular tool.
There are others. Cockoo.team for example. This one's a free tool. Great for teams that are collectively pomodoro’ing. It's called cuckoo and you can simply start a timer. Pick the duration Give the URL link to your teammates. You can see at the bottom how many people are in that Cuckoo. And you can see the time countdown you also have that visual reminder up in the browser that how much time is left and it has a lovely, pleasing sound when it dings. Good one to check out as well.
All right, let's talk about the duration of the Pomodoro. The pomodoro is a work interval plus a break so the break is included as the definition of the Pomodoro. And the goal of this focus time is to encourage consciousness concentration, and clear mind thinking.
The ideal duration according to the guide is 25 to 35 minutes long, 40 minutes at the most for both the work interval and the break. And he says experience shows that the Pomodoro technique works best with a 30 minute time period. So that's a 25 minute work interval plus a five minute break. Right, so that's about the timer. When you are in this pomodoro, which is advised to be 30 minutes – so 25 minute working pomodoro plus a five minute break – you're going to focus on a single task that you define during that pomodoro. And there's some rules around that.
The rules are the Pomodoro cannot be split up. So you can't have a half or a quarter pomodoro if you have a task, you can't say it's gonna take three and a half pomodoro it would take three hours or four, you commit to one or the other.
And then the other rule is if you start a pomodoro so you hit go on your timer, it has to bring if you do not focus for the full 25 minutes on that task that you defined, and you interrupt your pomodoro you have to void the Pomodoro. You don't get to reward yourself with a little x saying you completed that pomodoro you didn't complete it. It's void.
One reason you might not finish a pomodoro is because you get interrupted, we're going to talk about that. But your goal is to resist that and to complete working on what you defined, you're going to work on during that 25 minute time period. If the activity is completed once the Pomodoro has started – so it took you only 20 minutes, you're going to spend the last five minutes reviewing and observing the process that you took during that task. Until the Pomodoro rings, you're still going to focus on that task.
A big part of the system is learning, observing and incrementally improving. And so they want you to use that extra time should you find it to focus on those action activities. Then incrementally improve your process over time.
Alright, so that's step two.
The third thing you're going to do is work on the task until the Pomodoro rings. So you're going to immerse yourself into the next 25 minutes.
Let's talk a little bit more specifically about this step three working on the task until the Pomodoro rings.
There's a rule: Protect the Pomodoro.
I would advise you actually print this out and put it on a piece of paper or a sticky note in your workspace. You're going to need to remember that as you go along here, because the Pomodoro represents 25 minutes of pure work. And the truth is, you're going to get interruptions.
Okay, he says in the guide. He says: “the length of the Pomodoro 25 minutes seems short enough to make it possible to resist being distracted by various kinds of interruptions. But experience shows that once you've started using the technique, interruptions can become a real problem.”
I don't know if any of you have found that to be the case. I have a hunch you have. But you can cut down on the interruptions should be your core objective in your pomodoro practice. And in order to do this, you really do have to have what I call a distraction management plan.
So this is the heart of the entire presentation. If you can walk away from this having a distraction management plan, your focus is going to be improved, because you're going to have a contingency plan for when things come up.
And you need to plan for both internal and external issues. And let's go through these in more detail.
So we have two types of distractions that could interrupt our pomodoro.
The first are internal. We interrupt ourselves and I have found this has skyrocketed for me during this pandemic. It's our mental ideas and our mental thoughts.
And this is also part of my GTD practice. David Allen says “Your mind is for having ideas not holding them, you have to have a trusted system outside your brain.” So he preaches this all the time. And I have found that really helpful is getting it off my mind but also the Pomodoro is acknowledging that we interrupt ourselves and having a plan around that.
So some examples: Have you ever sat down, and suddenly it's urgent that you stand up and eat or drink something? Or you have to make a call immediately? Or you look up something on the internet this very second? Or you have to check for that email this very second? I don't know why it gets so urgent, but we all do it right?
So you need a plan to get distracted to avoid these distractions, and it's called my internal distraction abatement plan.
So, while you're working in your pomodoro, and it's ticking away, if you notice this internal distraction come up.
You can avoid voiding your pomodoro by taking a few seconds and making the distraction visible by tracking it. We're going to bring some awareness around how frequently you're interrupting yourself. So each internal distraction that you notice you're going to log on your tracking sheet, and it's going to get an asterisk sign next to the task.
And then you're going to have something in your brain that you come up with as an idea that is distracting. You're an actual log it in your tracking sheet and get it off of your mind. Then you're going to go back to finishing your pomodoro.
So this is your plan: The distraction comes in, I'm gonna go to my sheet, I'm going to log it as an asterisk, and I'm going to put that line item in my unplanned inventory.
And then I'm going to get back to work.
And then as soon as you get to through a pomodoro set, or you complete your day, you're going to review and observe your distraction list later.
And he says many of these distractions later proved to be anything that urgent, it's a different mind that reviews those items at the end of the Pomodoro, or a set of four, or at least at the end of the day. And it's sometimes surprising. I have found this to be true. It's shocking all the stuff that feels like it has to happen right now that can actually be delayed much longer. And your goal with this is to observe the number and type of internal interruptions you experience.
All right, and I want to give you a tool that will be helpful for some of you. This isn't my core issue, but I know a lot of people have trouble with their phone which is a really tempting distraction. It's called the Forest app and you can install it on your phone. And it helps you stay focused on the important things to life. Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a tree, your tree will grow while you focus on your work, but leaving the app will cause your tree to die. And they give you a little bit of guilt around that. So you can see on the right hand side, you have the option to give up by exiting the app, but you're gonna kill your tree. I mean, who wants to kill your tree? So it's kind of a gamification of attention distraction. And, it’s really smart. It's really simple, it's attractive, and this might be helpful to some of you.
We also have external distractions, so we get interrupted by others. And this is going to become your experiences in the workplace and you're going to experience it in a work from home situation as well – especially if you have other people around you.
So suddenly somebody needs a reply to a text, they suddenly have to show you this cat video, it's urgent. They need help on a project. They want to make plans. They DM you on Instagram. All of this stuff is a distraction that we often feel compelled to respond to immediately. We have to instill the same rule, which is to protect the Pomodoro.
And the truth is that true emergencies that need to be dealt with instantly are very rare. In real life, you all have had this experience. A 25 minute, or two hour delay, which is 4 pomodoros, is almost always possible for the person that wants to communicate with you. You know, some of you've probably realized, look, if I don't call him back for an hour, this is going to solve itself, right? I want you to challenge yourself and try to test if you can respond to them during the five minute break that's coming up. You know, it's coming up. Can you handle it in 25 minutes? Most of the time, the answer is yes.
With practice, you'll come to realize how often apparently urgent activities can even be postponed until the following day while still satisfying the person making the request. And he gives a strategy for dealing with external interruptions.
Again, our goal is to reach the end of the Pomodoro. So we get to take a few seconds and deal with the interruption, login and then come back.
And he suggests that when you get that interruption, you inform, negotiate and follow up.
So you inform effectively. You say something like “I'm in the middle of a pomodoro”. Your audience and the people that you deal with will start to learn what that means over time.
Or you just say “I'm not in a spot where I can respond right now.”
You negotiate quickly to reschedule an option: “can I call you back in half an hour?”, and then you follow through and follow up with the person who interrupted you as you agreed upon.
So again, adding this vocabulary I'm in the middle of the Pomodoro to those in your space could be a useful tip.
The other thing that's really helpful in your plan for dealing with these external distractions is to reduce them with visual cues. So I love this example back to that picture of my friends that I went to Philadelphia with to do co-working with. She is now in a situation where her kids are at home, she works from home, her husband is working from home also. So now we've got the four of them in their same visual space.
So she gave the task to her daughter to create some signs, so that they all had the ability to put the sign up and say, “Don't interrupt me”. Right now I'm trying to focus on my homework or on my work that I'm doing. And her daughter came up with one sign for each member of the family, This is a great kid activity for this time, and then you can just post your computer sign on your computer when you're focused or when you're in your pomodoro.
This can be as simple as having a sticky note or something along those lines, but a great wonderful little strategy to deploy and get everybody on the same page about your focus.
So you can reduce the external distractions with visual cues.
And then we're going to do the same thing with external distractions that we did with internal distractions, you're going to log it, this time with a dash, not an asterisk, but with a dash, and you're going to log the negotiated item.
So we went through the plan of telling someone you'll call them back, you're going to log that as an unplanned item and get it off your mind again, back to David Allen – you are not going to hold it on our mind, you’re going to hold it in a spot where we'll go back and review it.
And then you're going to get back to finishing your pomodoro. Okay, this activity allows you to continue with that 25 minute work and get to where you can actually check off a pomodoro if you take the bait though and go with the distraction you have to avoid your pomodoro and then later you're going to review and observe your distraction list.
So here's what he says which is really stunning. I know from talking to friends who are in a traditional work environment, and now people who are thrust into work from home with families working around them, you may discover you have up to 10, or even 15, external interruptions during a single pomodoro. Stunning. The goal here is just to simply log that and renegotiate. Log, renegotiate, log, renegotiate and observe the number of times you are getting interruptions.
This observation practice alone will change your behavior over time and will change how you structure things. It's really powerful stuff simply by logging it.
So let's look at how we can do this in the template that I gave you guys in Evernote. You can see that there's a column for interrupted pomodoro rows and we are just logging * and say I'm watching the course that I committed to doing. I'm in my pomodoro and I get these ideas in the middle of the training. My mind starts to wander: “oh my gosh, I need to create these pop up sessions that I'm going to have for my community”. “I need to get this challenge scheduled, this is essential,” and “oh my gosh, I've got to get something positive in my life, we've got to watch Cheer on Netflix”, “okay, I'm going to log all those things over here in my unplanned and urgent because they're interrupting my pomodoro. And I'm gonna log the little * over here for the quantity of interruptions that I have. And, on the flip side, my brother, who's a bartender and just got told that they're closing the shop for the foreseeable future. That's a big interruption, I need to call him back. So I'm going to log that I need to call my brother. And if you create a time, say,, I'm going to call you back at four o'clock, you can put the time in here and log it and you're going to log that external distraction here. And then if my friend Karen calls and I said I'd call her back at eight tonight, I would log it there and log out as a distraction.
So again, you want to keep track of how many of these things you are experiencing while you're trying to focus on that single task of, you know, watching the starting fresh with Evernote course. And you're going to log them and then get right back to your task at hand until the Pomodoro rings.
If the Pomodoro rings, you can then log it as a completed item, which we'll get to in step four.
For those of you that are in my EverDone system, I handle this a slightly different way. We use the mind sweep note to get everything off of our brain and do our brain dump and then we process that during our weekly review later in the week.
But you can also track still all of those little distractions right here next to the task on your daily task management note using an * and the –. And then one of the other things that I would encourage you all to do is use note links which I gave you guys a resource in the handout, a free really detailed blog post I did about how to use note links how to create and use note links in Evernote in create these interactions and quick hyperlinks between two notes in your system for navigational purposes. Certainly there's lots of ways to navigate around Evernote. But this is a really good way to let you hop between these two related notes really quickly.
Alright, let's talk about some additional issues. And again, this is the bulk of the challenge that we have with the Pomodoro Technique is these interruptions. So if you can get some ideas and some takeaways just from this section, you're gonna be miles ahead in your in your focus.
The truth is, you might decide that the Pomodoro absolutely has to be interrupted. You have human weakness, you get into temptation, or it's a real emergency. Your action in the Pomodoro technique is to void the current pomodoro. Even if it's about to ring, you don't get to log it.
And you start over, you just hit stop on the Pomodoro deal with the interruption and then when you're ready to sit down and focus again, you start Pomodoro Technique over on that particular task, and you agree and give yourself a little grace and say the next pomodoro will go better.
The next pomodoro will go better. He actually has that in the guide.
So the next pomodoro will go better. It's another mantra. And that's how it goes.
This technique is not about tracking when you start and when you finish, it's about tracking how many units of time you successfully focused on a task, and then understanding how long that task actually took you in that capacity. So it's a very different way to look at things but it's also really, really powerful and helps you with your planning over time.
The other is constant interruptions. Basically, you're finding that you can't complete a pomodoro because the distractions are just too great.
If that's the case, but you're successfully abating them with your procedures, set the Pomodoro for 25 minutes and change your goal within that 25 minutes. You want to force yourself – pomodoro after pomodoro – to increase and never reduce the amount of time that you work non-stop.
So for example, say to yourself, “okay, in this pomodoro, I have managed to work uninterrupted for 10 minutes.” So this means that the other 15 minutes you spent abating your interactions or disruptions and interruptions. In the next pomodoro decide “I'm going to work at least 10 minutes and I might even work 11 minutes”. So just shift how much you can get done in an uninterrupted format as your goal for the Pomodoro. And consider that a success.
Your goal, ultimately, will be to get to a 25 minute mark of continuous work with no interruptions.
I think the truth is that this slide is probably really important for the existing environment that we're in. I know that when I was first learning the technique, I was struggling with this particular awareness of how many interruptions I get, and I had to break it down further and say, Okay, look, I was only able to work for five minutes during this pomodoro and all those other distractions, but it's really enlightening, right? It's really enlightening to observe that and then you can just work for six the next time. So this would be a really good slide to focus on and strategize around and practice with. The truth is those results are going to come through practice and doing pomodoro after pomodoro and you're sure your focus will sharpen.
Alright, so that is it. Step three, we're going to this is the bulk and the heart of the challenge of the Pomodoro Technique, okay, and it's going to be our biggest challenge in this current environment.
Rule is to protect the Pomodoro. Your goal is to cut down on the interruptions and have a distraction management plan for both internal and external interruptions and distractions.
Step four. When the Pomodoro rings, you're going to log it with an X.
We've successfully avoided all of those distractions, we've got our little technique to log them and observe them. And congratulations, you've spent an entire interruption list pomodoro on a task. So you simply stop working when it rings. You log your completed pomodoro.
Sounds simple enough, right? But there's hiccups even with this step, and here's the hiccup. You might say to me: “But Stacey, I just need two more minutes to finish that task.”
So in the true Pomodoro Technique, you are not allowed to keep working for even just for a few more minutes. Even if you're convinced that in those few minutes you would complete the task at hand. And I have to say he doesn't go into why in great detail here. But I can tell you from my experience with GTD and the community that I have around my EverDone product, the reason has to do with endurance and focus and valuing rest. Generally this is highly undervalued in our culture, and in a Western culture particularly. We'll talk more about it as we get through step four in a couple of spots or step five and six.
The other real thing that I have found from David Allen's practice is we grossly underestimate how long it's going to take to do something. So even if you think it's just two minutes, I challenge you to test put a timer on your clock and on your phone and test how quickly two minutes go. The truth is it takes us so much longer than we think. And we are constantly lying to ourselves about how much we can get done. So I have found that to be true, but you want to pace yourself and conserve your energy.
And this is where he first brings in his marathon example. A marathoner might be wanting to burst out of the gates and run fast those first couple of miles, but they're conserving energy for the long haul. And we're trying to build endurance and focus. And so a rule that you are to follow if you're following the Pomodoro Technique purely, is that you're not going to work for just a few more minutes, even if you're convinced that you can complete the task at hand.
The other thing to note is that if you happen to be at the last Pomodoro for a particular task, you can cross it off. Here's how that would look like in Evernote. You would simply put the checkbox in there and tick it off. in whichever method you're using. These are or methods you're not, you wouldn't do both. you'd pick one or the other. And then you have a the strikethrough feature in Evernote and the font formatting you can strike through if you want.
In practicality in my practice on the right, which is represented by the right hand side, I'm just taking off the multiple boxes and not taking off the starting fresh with Evernote.The CEO of Evernote has put a public video out talking about how they are doing a strikethrough feature on task lists. So I expect that sometime this year, we will see that happen more automatically. But it is currently possible, you just need to do the format feature in the font. And in the meantime, how I actually operate as shown on the right hand side of the screen here.
Alright, step five. We stopped working, we logged our completed pomodoro and now we're going to take a short break. So breathe, meditate, grab a cup of coffee, go for a short walk or do something else relaxing, specifically not work related. And he says your brain will thank you later.
So the rules are you have to break you must rest. And this is what guarantees consistently high productivity.
It's around this idea of detachment that he discusses fairly deeply in the guide. By applying the Pomodoro Technique, many people have begun to understand the value and effectiveness of detachment, which by the way, when growing up, I never learned this lesson. I never was taught this lesson in school. This has been a huge eye opener for me in terms of my adult life, and I still struggle with the value of rest.
We often have a cultural aversion to breaks, they're considered a sign of weakness, particularly in the Western cultures as I've mentioned. But the breaks are the key to focus endurance building. So try that out and see if that's true for you. I'm finding it's been true for me.
And he makes the point in the guide that this extreme behavior at work actually reveals a tenaciousness that often lays a solid foundation for frustration and working with a lack of concentration. And consequently a lack of effectiveness.
So he's actually making the point that we're not resting enough, and that's what’s causing the lack of concentration and effectiveness, which we're trying to do the opposite. We're trying to focus.
So he lays it out: take a break.
Let's talk about the break length. He says it depends on how you feel. It should be no less than three to five minutes. But there is some flexibility in that. He says when you're especially tired, you can stop working for up to 10 minutes. But he advises that downtime between pomodoro should consistently not last more than five to 10 minutes because it risks breaking the rhythm that he's trying to have us build in these pomodoro sets. So there's a rhythm to the focus. And you want to not break that.
If you take longer breaks, it tends to signify play time, which is rest and he doesn't want our brain to get into that spot because he actually doesn't advocate using the Pomodoro Technique.for fun and leisure activities. The technique, he says, should be separate. So this is a work oriented technique, and a tip for you (there's a link to this example in the handout) you can create a break activity list.
So Brit, who I mentioned got really into the Pomodoro Technique after our session in Philadelphia said, “You know, I wrote down a bunch of things that I could do, so I didn't have to think about it when the break came.”. And, I think this is a great idea.
You can make a list of things that might work for you. And I think it might be helpful to add things to avoid, I mean, how many of us are going to be gaining the “corona 19” in terms of pounds, right, because we all are stocked up on food and eating at the house. So I put on it things to avoid eating the chocolate chips that are sitting there. That's not a good activity for me to do during my break.
Give yourself a list of ideas, add to it as you go along. Evernote is a great tool for that. And then another thing you could do is you could create a hyperlink. This is another great place to use a hyperlink in Evernote.
Just link to back to your daily productive sheet and then add a link both ways and you’ll have a hyperlink between them.
So that’s another quick tip on how to use Evernote a little bit better.
And then you can move on to step six, every four pomodoro is you're going to take a longer break.
Once you've completed 4 pomodoros, you can take a longer break. 20 minutes is good or 30. Your brain will use this time to assimilate new information and rest before the next round of pomodoros.
So he's saying take a 15 to 30 minute restorative break after a set of pomodoros. And the most important thing is to not do anything complex. Otherwise your mind won't be able to reorganize and integrate what you've learned. And as a result, you won't be able to give the next pomodoro your best efforts.
So some examples: walk the dog, rest, clean the kitchen. And he also makes the point that if you're getting tired, try to avoid going more than 30 minutes because, again, you're going to have this rhythmic disruption that the Pomodoro system is designed to create. He also says (this is his vocabulary) “it would be a serious mistake to take shorter breaks between sets because you're under pressure. Your mind needs time to integrate and get ready to receive new information to solve the upcoming problems in the next pomodoro.”
So the same tendencies we have to overwork in the short timeframe carry over into the long break as well. And again, he's back to the importance of rest and the impact that that has cumulatively on our ability to focus.
So my tip here would be to adjust your break options list to include some long break options as well. And again, I included this example in your handout, which you can get the URL for right there on the slide.
So there you go. That's his core process. We went through all six steps.
Let's conclude with a couple of reminders or ideas about how to get started with this.
One common issue that is related to this collective sense that we're all experiencing right now is a feeling of being lost and stressed.
A pomodoro can be dedicated to exploration in order to set your priorities straight and lay out a new plan. So this is something I have actually come to naturally, through my 10 years of working at home.
My day starts every day with a planning pomodoro. It's just part of my morning ritual that I have a pomodoro where I am sitting down assessing the context of today, deciding how much energy (back to my energy management focus) I have and decide if I’m going to have big work day or not. I decide how I’m going to map out my day based on the current context. And that's kind of a hybrid of my GTD and my pomodoro practice. And but really, if you find yourself in this lost and stressed, allocate a whole pomodoro to just figuring it out.
Take the time to decide what is it that you need to do – maybe you need to journal for a pomodoro. That's perfectly acceptable as well.
And then the initial objective when you're first getting started is to finish a single pomodoro 25 minutes of work on a given day on a given activity without interruptions. So when you've achieved that, which could take you six months – there's no harm in that! – you've really started to integrate the technique into your life.
And this is going to vary on how quickly we can do this. Depending on the structure of our work, the structure of our quarantine, the structure of all these different types of things can vary, but what I think is really important to understand about this point is you haven't failed.
If you're struggling to get 25 minutes without interruptions, that in of itself is a very meaningful goal.
And if you're especially tired you should organize shorter sets of pomodoro. So maybe three instead of two blocks of four, and take longer breaks between the sets. Adapt it and value rest in the process.
And don't forget the mantra, the next pomodoro will go better.
And the last thing I want to introduce to you, which I have found through my own practice, and that I am doubling down on during this particular time of uncertainty is to lean on community for accountability and support.
And he even states in the guide: “experience shows that applying the technique in terms in teams, or organizing work in pairs, results in less learning time and more consistent results.”
So back to Brit saying “I knew about it, but I didn't try it until we all sat together and did it now My life has changed.”
There's lots of lots of online communities out there that are doing this and cowork in this Pomodoro Technique. So I'm gonna give you three resources that you could look into and if none of them resonate for you, I encourage you to get out there and seek ones that do because it's really a key part of my practice.
First, within my EverDone community if you're a GTD’er and you want to do GTD in Evernote, there's a couple resources in the handout that you can look into. I do a guided weekly review once a month where we apply the Pomodoro technique to actually doing our weekly review which GTD. It’s a key part of the process and also challenging for most people to get to. And in addition, in this pandemic time I'm going to be hosting some bonus productivity pop-ups are in the community where we can get together and work around this pomodoro timed element for a set. So those will be coming over the next week for the next four to eight weeks depending how long this all lasts.
I also am a personally a member of this group called Ultraworking, and The Work Gym for about a year and a half. I work in Pomodoro’s with them probably 16 hours a week. It's transformed my work from home experience. And they're offering a pandemic “quarantine support” option right now where you can come and check out the community, and then opt to stay on and pay their monthly subscription fee, which is $49 a month currently.
It's a really curated kind of group of people. But I have found it immensely effective in helping me to focus and it's all based around the Pomodoro Technique. So the URL is there. If you want to check it out. You can look at that quarantine support page, which is where that URL takes you, and watch that video from Sebastian explaining what the community is and it will help you identify if you're a good fit for it. You'll see me working in there. Be sure to say hi if you join and you find me co working alongside you.
And another one that I have found is called Digital Nomad Girls. So look around at your own personal interests. I love to travel. Obviously, that's all halted right now. And I have this whole community of other women who also can work virtually. And even just two days ago – there's a picture of us all co working during one of their pomodoro led sessions. And that's just one of the offerings that they have like this feeling of community around people who have a like interest and need to cowork and they use the Pomodoro Technique there. You'll find me in there as well.
So just a couple of options that hopefully open your mind to the fact that these things exist and the support helps.
I'm going to conclude with this slide. I want to kind of wrap it up with my personal focus plan that includes this Pomodoro Technique, and how I'm personally coping with what's going on today.
First of all, I'm doubling down on my own personal GTD and pomodoro practice. They create some clarity and they give me hope and kind of a structure in which to move forward. And I dump everything that is stressful or on my mind into my mindsweep note – that's my GTD practice in Evernote. And I time block proactively those hours during the day that I'm going to work. And I divide those into pomodoros. So that's the core part of my productivity practice prior to the pandemic, and even more so now.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have a strong focus on managing my energy as opposed to my time and I just give into that. And I found as soon as I had a lot of grace around that my life got easier. And I got more productive. It really speaks to this lesson that I'm still learning that rest is really valuable.
Notification management critical. I have very few apps that have that red notification visible to tell me activity in them. Most, I have to proactively go and check them. It's a purposeful practice that I have as part of my work from home environment. I advocate that you take an inventory and audit those things for yourself as well.
And in addition, the number of open apps, and what apps I have open while I'm working, are purposeful. I constantly have to evaluate this because I'm one to have a zillion windows open at a time. But certainly having a focus – or maybe just even a check sheet of those – to remind yourself can be super helpful.
And in this time, in particular, I've had to make active decisions about my TV and news management. When am I going to allow myself to consume that information? Here's the truth. In five minutes by going to Twitter and current news, you can find out what the latest is. You don't have to have the very first thing in your day be checking the news. You can work for a pomodoro or two first, and then check the news. It is an OK option. It feels like the world's falling apart but even that can be delayed for hours to find out. That's my theory. At least that's been working for me and helping my mind to focus.
And then online community participation and accountability. I gave you the resources that I use. I love to hear resources that you guys find around that as well. And would welcome to see you in any of those that I mentioned, as well.
So I stuck to an hour. As a reminder, the Pomodoro all the resources links that I mentioned here, are located in that handout.
Thanks for joining me.