Pomodoro Technique - Boost Your Focus and Productivity with Time-Blocking

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are into our new season, season number 23. You can't see that, but some people can. A little like, you know, hint there. If you're listening to this and you're not seeing it, check us out. We've got a YouTube channel where you get to see this, not live, but you get to see some video behind it and that may or may not help you. We are developing or we are building better developers. This is Building Better Habits, the season where we have already talked a little bit about security awareness. Hopefully you took that challenge on and you took a look at some of the tools out there and spent a little time in your security awareness world and looked at like, maybe there's some things that you should change. You know, some of the common things are like, maybe it's time to change that password that you've used for 18, you know, or 18 decades maybe and or once or however long it is, but it's probably too long. This episode, we're going to get into what we already talked about a little bit, the Pomodoro technique. But before we do that, we should introduce ourselves. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am a founder of Develop and Newer, Building Better Developers, also founder of RB Consulting, where we help you with your technology challenges. We try to make that technology sprawl and bring it all back together and make you something nice. So you're not like a technology hoarder where you've got all of these different places, you've got all these things stored. Instead, you're bringing it back together and you're using what you have and you're using it to the best ability that you can. We use that, do that via simplification and automation, integration, all of these shuns that we use to bring that, all that stuff down into something that's much more useful and it makes it more productive and it reduces your costs. Good thing, bad thing. Let's see. Good thing, bad thing this week. A good thing, oh, a good thing is, I think I've mentioned this before, is that there's a place in town where you can just like, you can trade in, it's a bookstore effect of it, you can trade in like books and videos and game systems and all kinds of crap. And I'm in a, I'm in a simplifying my life mode right now, like downsizing stuff, trying to get load, get rid of a lot of crap that otherwise is going to be sitting in storage for a while. And part of that is I've been going through and we have, I am a gamer collector of some sorts and I have like, I have the, and sorry if this is too much for it, but I have like from an Atari 2600 and stuff like that, I've got all sorts of like Gameboys and Gameboy advances and PS Vita's and like all the way up to like PS ones and twos and threes and fours and all that kind of stuff. And so it's been amazing how much of that stuff I've got that it's just like suddenly there's whole like rooms open basically because I'm taking some of the stuff and being able to donate or not donate, but sell it away. And then I get some, you know, some money so I can go back and convert all of these big rooms of cartridges into like a nice little digital library and things like that. So that's been really good. And it is a, I live in a world where I can take all of my sprawl and I actually get a few bucks out of it after, you know, at the end of the day. And I feel so much better because I have like carloads of stuff and now I come back with just a little, you know, wallet full of money instead of that carload of stuff. So that's a good thing. A bad thing is within that I've got laptops laying around. There are BooCoo laptops that really serve no purpose other than paperweights. I could hook them up. I could do something if I want to go play like a Windows 95 game, I guess I could go do that, but I'm not going to do anything productive on those machines anymore. And there's a few that I've been able to be like, all right, cool. I'm going to reset them and all that. But the bad thing is there's a few that I could not for the life of me, like I can reset it 18 different times and it keeps coming back to, it resets everything except the admin user and the lock screen. And so it's like, it's still got to be the same person so it's there and it's just, it's a pain in the butt. So technology, it giveth and it taketh away. On the other side, we're just going to giveth the control over to Michael, let him introduce himself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Mlosh. I'm one of the co-founders of developerner building better, building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we build software tailored to meet the unique needs of healthcare professionals and small to midsize e-commerce businesses. If you're looking to build new applications, we will help you through software assessments, building out those software design documents and then building the software. For existing businesses with actual applications they're trying to support, we will come in and we can help you build the testing into your systems to actually help you be able to maintain those legacy systems and produce newer software. Good and bad. Good. We're making a lot of progress with a couple of little customers I have. We're moving things along, which is always good. You kind of go from the anxiety of, are we going to get there to, yay, we're moving along, moving that dial forward. A bad thing, I still have gotten absolutely nothing done in the yard. The temperatures have finally dropped. I'm able to actually get outside and not die from overexposure to the sun. And my to-do list is going to stack up pretty quickly here. So we want to talk about the Pomodoro technique. Now, Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. It's P-O-M-O-D-O-R-O. And you can go search that wherever you want. And we'll wrap up here in a little bit. We'll talk about what your challenge will be for the week. But I want to really talk a little bit about more about what it is and what it's, the value it can bring. The idea of this, and if you go look, it's really, I forget why they originally said tomato other than I think it had to do with the timers they were using and some things like that. But the idea, by default, now you can tweak these things. By default, the way Pomodoro technique works is the idea is that you take 25 minutes, in a half hour block, you take 25 minutes that are ultimately focused. No phone, no email, no nothing. You have a task and you're focused on that and that's it. Don't bounce to another task. Don't split your focus at all. It is not multitasking. It is the opposite of that. It is hyper task, hyper focused on your task. So if you are coding, then you are coding that language, that project, that task. You're not bouncing around to like a log file that's sitting there running in the background and checking on it or you're not answering an email, you're not out on Slack or anything like that. You're focused. And then at the end of the 25 minutes, you get a five minute break and then you jump into your next Pomodoro, which is another 25 minutes of work, five minute break. The whole idea is to get you like really, really focused, step back at the end of it, take your little break, take a deep breath, go get some something to drink or bathroom break or whatever it needs to be, and then step right back into it. In theory, it is, if you work an eight hour day, you would do, if you break that up into half hour blocks, you would do 16 Pomodoros. What you will find out if you ever do a full day is you will not get 16 Pomodoros done. That five minute break is going to often, it'll stretch to maybe seven or 10 or 15 minutes or things like that because this goes back to realizing how much we get interrupted. You'll do your 25 minutes and you'll come back for your five and like, oh, I'm going to check my email real quick. And then 30 minutes later, you're just now wrapping up your emails, particularly if you're in something where you've got team interactions, stuff like that. You're like, oh yeah, I got to resolve this. I got to go send this. Now you could, if you did it right, you could say, I'm going to do a Pomodoro of coding, let's say, and then I'm going to do an email Pomodoro where I'm going to spend 25 minutes and all I'm going to do is crank through my emails. And if I don't, this is actually something where there's some interesting value that you've got in these things is if you say, I am going to spend 25 minutes on this task and you get it done in 15 minutes, then the goal is that saying, okay, I don't just quit after 15 minutes. I'm going to do some extra stuff. So I actually use this a lot for business development things. So it's like, I'm going to spend 25 minutes focused only on business development. And I may go into it saying, okay, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to tackle invoices. Let's just say, and I'm just random stuff, tackle invoices. However, if I get the invoices done in 15 minutes and I still got 10 left, my whole point is like, I'm going to tackle invoices and now I'm going to flip over and maybe start a blog article or I'm going to go, and I usually it's because I've got a whole series of tasks, which goes to another idea of the whole GTD getting things done world. But I'll have tasks of stuff where it's like, oh, I've got 10 minutes. Well, here, I'm going to go take this little five minute task. I'm going to go knock this off. It may be crank out an email. It may be update a status document somewhere. It may be go out to a server and do just a quick, like kick off some updates on that to make sure that it's done its latest software updates. Those kinds of things where you have small tasks, but you need to get a bunch of those done and you really need to focus on this, where you need to say, look, I have to put in X amount of work. Then Pomodoro's work really well. It actually fits really well. Also with some of the things that we'll talk about, we've talked about before and we will talk about this season. It's the idea of doing regular progression on something, keeping momentum going. For example, if you wanted to learn a new language, spoken language, programming language, whatever it is, you can decide I'm going to do a Pomodoro every single day on this. You can then research language, write little scripts based on that or little apps based on that language. If it's a spoken language, you can go through your, if you're using Duolingo or one of those things, you can go through those things. And then when you're done, you're done. And it really is nice to have four things when it's like even things that are entertaining. So it could be, I'm a gamer and I'm going to do a gaming Pomodoro. I'm going to spend 25 minutes playing this game and that's it. And that actually goes to something I used to use where I was like, that was a carrot and stick kind of approach. And I was like, okay, if I do on when I'm not in my day job, when I'm doing my side hustle, that was my reward. And I'd be like, okay, I'm going to do two hours of work on work, whatever my side hustle is. And then I give myself a 30 minute reward of, okay, and then I'm going to go play games or I'm going to go listen music or I'm going to do something that's fun to like balance it out. That all work and no play kind of thing. So Pomodoros are, yes, it is almost by definition is a time boxing approach to something. Where you're saying I'm going to do X amount of time on this, but it also breaks it up to say I'm going to focus and then I'm going to step back. I'm going to focus. I'm going to step back. I mentioned the default. The default is 25 and five. A lot of people shift it. So there's a lot of people that will do like 45 and 15 maybe because then it still falls in an hour or they could, I mean, you could just do a 50 and 10. You could just basically like double it up and just keep your focus for that 50 minutes. I find the 45, 15 works really, really well in the business world because we'll have meetings often that are half hour an hour, then usually on the hour. And so what you could do is you can put a block in your calendar. It's another thing we'll talk about is scheduling things like that, but you could put a block in your calendar that I am going to work on X. You can do this on side hustle stuff as well, things like that. It's like, I'm going to spend an hour on this. And within that hour, what you do is you start off your Pomodoro and a lot of times it works well if it's a task like this because first five minutes you're prepping for the task. You spend your 45 minutes in the Pomodoro really focused on it. And then you spend a few minutes, that 10 minutes sort of wrapping it up, cleaning it up and then you move on to your next task. There's a lot of different ways you can leverage Pomodoro. Now, before we get into the challenge for this time, I'm going to pitch this over to Michael because I know you have also done this in the past and have obviously some of the same and some different experiences as well. So I want to get some of your thoughts and maybe some of the ways that you have leveraged it. Sure. I'm actually going to start out slightly different. So you've kind of laid in all the groundwork in that of the Pomodoro techniques and never say this, right? That's one habit I have to break. It's pronouncing words the right way, but I digress. One of the problems I had and I still have sometimes with the Pomodoro technique is not over like trying to do too much within that time frame. It's like, okay, my list is too broad or I have too many items on my list and I'm trying to do too much. So one of the issues I found that I've had to kind of tailor over the years is this is a task driven approach. It is you are trying to get things done within a block of time. However, if you are a micromanager or you just have a lot of things to do, you'll just sit down and the first thing you want to do is make a list. So you start writing down all the things you have to do. Well, as you write that list, it's like it just keeps growing. The problem with that is if you make a list that's too broad, too long, if you try to do all that in a single day, you're not going to do it. You're going to get frustrated. You're going to get burned out and you're not going to be able to really keep it within the Pomodoro model. The other thing is the idea that they have, I think with the actual timer is you kind of want that kitchen timer because if you have the little digital timers, it's so easy to ignore those or you forget about them or they get hidden in the background. So having that little kitchen timer on your desk and it makes that ding, it's like, oh, OK, I definitely need to take a break and step back. So as you're building out that list, one of the cool things I found over time was just take an 8 by 11 sheet of paper, fold it till it's about the size of an index card. Then in normal handwriting, write down a list of tasks that you need to get done for the day. And you can do this daily. So you have your daily tasks, but then you have those other business tasks like Rob mentioned, like checking your email or following up with teams or daily meetings. So that you could put in another on another like flip it over, write it on the other side. Then what you do is you put these things into like a task manager and you got to be careful about task managers because you can overwhelm them again. But as you're going through this block out, OK, this task is going to be 25 minutes market say OK, in between that, I want to take the 15 minute break or the five minute break. Put the break in your task. Go for a walk, check email, bio break. It may sound strange, but you kind of want to micromanage it a little bit at first till you get comfortable doing this, because if not, you're going to be a little bit overwhelmed and you're just going to kind of get stuck in a heads down mode. It's like, OK, I'm working on this task. Stop. Oh, but I'm not done with this task, so I need to keep working on this task. And yes, you can, but take that break. Take that five minute break. Go do something else and then come back and jump right back into it and kind of run with it some more. So those are just some of the techniques and things I've learned over time that you just have to be careful with this technique. It is very useful and it's very helpful, especially for those of us that are a little bit too multitask or so-called multitask driven, where we're doing too many tasks at once. I used to pride myself on being a very good multitasker until I realized that really multitasking is a lie. And I've said this before in other conversations. If you are spreading your attention across multiple things, you're not paying enough attention to actually get the job done. So it's going to take you longer to actually get that task done. So you're better off just saying, hey, wait just a minute. Let me finish this. Spend the time. Finish that email. Finish that phone call. Finish what it is you're working on. And if you need to add a placeholder, add a little note where you're at when you're done. Turn, finish your conversation with the person you have, answer the phone, and then pick it back up where you left off and run with it. Because if you stop something midstream and then you can't get back to that for a day or two, you're going to be like, what the heck was I doing? And now you've got to spend all that time kind of ramping back up, which is something we haven't really talked about, but we can come back to that later, is your mindset. You want to make sure that you're focused, that you stay focused and stay on task. That's really kind of my take on this whole technique. That really is the, I think that focus is really the key to all of this. And it is, it is one of those, it needs to be serial. It needs to be a serial process. So if you've got a list, if you're going to step into, and I'm glad you brought that up because that is something, as I mentioned, it's like you could come into a Pomodoro and have maybe a list of three tasks that you want to tackle within that time snippet. The goal is, but the goal is you need to do task one, task two, task three. You do not bounce around to them. You get very focused. You get the first one, start it, get it complete. Then you move on to the next one. If you don't get to the end, that's okay. That spills to some other time. The goal is you need to focus one at a time and walk your way through it. And focus is so much the, the keyword here is the focus of this idea is that you're not getting distracted by, you know, texts and emails and chat rooms and all that kind of other stuff that can pop up. And that leads us to the challenge for the week. And I just started, I was sort of playing around with this last week and I hadn't done this in a while. And so that was why it like, there's some key things going to bring out that are literally the issues that I ran into. So in starting out, the challenge for this is for the next five workdays. And honestly, I think it's actually better for the next seven days, each day, do one Pomodoro. You don't have to do two, three, eight, do one. Pick a Pomodoro. a couple of tasks and just try it. You can, you can Google or Bing or whatever your favorite search engine, Pomodoro. There are all kinds of you. There's timers everywhere. There's descriptions that's everywhere. There are web pages out there that have really nice little things that will, you know, do your, do all your timers and they've got graphics and all that kind of stuff. So whatever works for you. And I recommend that if it doesn't work the first day, make some changes to it the next day around. The goal is just do one is to your goal to this mission. Should you choose to accept it? Is it you do 25 minutes? Then you can change if you want to do whatever your timeframe is, but you do 25 minutes of that focused work and you're going to run into things, which I ran into where I did that, but I had not set stuff up enough. So I had emails come through. I had texts come through. I had all these different things like text are really tough because I'm sitting there on working on my computer and my phone's over on the side and it'll start doing its little like, Hey, pay attention, pay attention. I'm over here. And so you got to like put your phone away. When I did this regularly, I did this for a while, many years ago. One of the things I did is I put my phone in another room. I didn't even, I had no phone there. I made sure there was no way to get a hold of me or distract me from it. And this includes, I said the next seven days, I think it is going to be very valuable for you to not only do a work related stuff thing, but try something that is not necessarily work related. So it may be things like I'm going to do a Pomodoro where I clean a bathroom or I'm cleaning the kitchen or I'm organizing my office or whatever it is to see that to get you to sort of, I feel that there is value in focus. We talk so much about like, you know, and we are like the world screams at us with all these different ways to get a hold of us. And you got to talk to me right now and I got to do this. I got to have 18 conversations at a time. And you know how much you get ticked off when you're on a support on chat and you know that person on their side that is supporting 18 people at the same time. They're really distracted. Or if you really want to do this, go out with your significant other and while you're talking to them over dinner, be looking at your phone the whole time. See how well that works out for you. So we don't like it when people have their attention split. And so we need to, there's a reason for that. It's because if your attention is split, you're not giving all of your focus to the tasks at hand. So let's try doing that with our work. And that's why I said, extend it seven days and pick something that's even a not a work thing because I think this will help you do a better job of it. It's just you'll start realizing where focus and batching tasks together and some of those things really do bring value because it really comes down to if you want to be more productive. It's not about doing more things at the same time. It's finding a way to reduce the natural cost of switching gears from one thing to another. If you want a purely mechanical example of it, if you go to race car drivers and they're flying through all their different gears, one of the things is the faster they can move from gear one to two to three to four to five to six, seven, the better that's all process improvement there. They're still going to accelerate probably at roughly the same rate and things like that. But that, while you're changing gears, that time they can reduce. So there's things like that. That's where this has become valuable. The challenge is next seven days, once a day, at least, and I would say just start with just one. Don't push it too much. Do one Pomodoro each day and then let us know your thoughts, especially as you get into that day six and day seven and after you've completed it, see if you want to continue. Or I would love to hear feedback on this. Where did you find it was a challenge? Where did you find it worked really well? Part of it is like, what kinds of tasks did you choose? And before we wrap this one up, because normally we leave bonus material for those that are out on the YouTube world, in the visual world. I do want to throw one extra bonus thought as you're going into this, even though we're going to do one each day in our challenge. One of the things you can do when you decide to put several Pomodoros together, it does not, you do not have to work, break, work, break. What you can do is you can do work, break, and then keep that into the break for the next section so that you're basically doubling up your breaks. So instead of 25, 5, 25, 5, you can do 25, 10, 25, 10 and do that as your breaks. And I mentioned that because it was something Michael said that triggered me and I'd forgotten about during the COVID years. It felt like years, I guess it was like a year or something like that. I was in a situation where I was sort of doing Pomodoro stuff, but I was doing it and I wasn't doing it officially, but I would do 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. And it was just something that worked out really well for my schedule because I wanted to keep focused because there was like, it was sometimes hard to keep focused on the things I needed to get done. But one of the things I would do towards the middle of the day, after a couple of Pomodoros, is I would do 45 minutes and then I would have a half hour before my next 45 minute break. During that half hour, I would go do a mile walk basically. So it would be, I could take that half hour. I could go spend, depending on how I did it, whether it was a walk or jog or whatever, I could spend 15, 20, 25 minutes getting some exercise, getting away from my desk. And it was a great way to recharge and then come back into that next 45 minute focus. You could do the same thing if you want. If you're like a power napper, you could go take that time and go take a 15 minute power nap. You could go get lunch break. There's things you can do if you shift that around. So that's your bonus for this one. And once again, love to hear what your feedback is. How does this work for you? How does it not work for you? Because these are the kinds of things that we all try to find ways to do stuff better. And we don't always have that, we don't know it like out of the gate. We don't always have the best approach. So I think hearing from others will help us quite a bit. You can do that by shooting an email to info at developinure.com. You can leave comments, whether that's a podcast, wherever you see podcasts, or out on the YouTube Developineur channel, you can leave comments there. Those are probably some of the best places to do it because then you can share that with everybody and get some feedback and get some of the community around this and figure out how these things work for you. You can also contact us. We've got a contact form on developineur.com. You can go out to Twitter. We are at developineur. You may want to throw something there and just do like little retweets there to just let us know how you're doing. We'll say hashtag Pomodoro because I know there's already a hashtag out there and a lot of people follow that in the community. So that may help. That being said, big breath, wrap this one up. I don't think it took us 25 minutes. We should do that as an episode one time, do our little Pomodoro episode. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developineur Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.