The Pomodoro Technique Part 1

on Technology

For those of you who have me in your RSS, I’m sure your surprised to see my blog reappear. I’ve taken on a new challenge to start talking about any work I do, I hope it will enhance my career and encourage me to do more of it. The problem as per usual is that I don’t have the motivation to do much after work and the more I consider how to resolve such an issue the more I find myself becoming anxious. So in a new effort to combat that I’ve started trying the Pomodoro Technique.

The basic concept is this:

  1. List the tasks that you have to complete
  2. Add estimates for these tasks in terms of Pomodoros (25 minute periods)
  3. Start the tasks and take a 5 minute break every 25 minutes.

I assume that you should take longer breaks the more pomodoros you do.

I have found it works well at home but I have yet to give it a full chance at work yet due to these reasons:

  1. What do I do during 5 minute breaks? What is my boss going to think if I leave my desk?
  2. I get interrupted all the time in work, colleague needs help with something or a manager needs a question about the system answered
  3. A lot of the tasks I do take less than 25 minutes, how do they fit in?

Here is the website for the pomodoro technique http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
A book which I have yet to read is available on their site.

I was using a pomodoro timer on my computer, you can get that here: http://code.google.com/p/pomodairo/

I’ll add new parts to this post as I explore this further.