After a unusually grueling consulting stint that left me feeling burnt out, I found myself going through a motivational lull. Procrastination crept in, and I soon felt subject to the diktat of the ticking clock. I had lost my ability to concentrate, to focus on the task at hand. Hours would pass, and I still wouldn’t be done with my to-do list. Then days would pass, work would pile up mostly untouched, and with it my level of stress would increase. I first welcomed that as a mixed blessing – after all stress, when it reaches a certain threshold, eventually kicks the procrastinating mind into action. And sure enough, it did – I reluctantly completed the most critical tasks, just in time for their absolute deadline. Any deliverable that was not strictly a firefighting priority would be sent back to the end of the queue; and the quality of the work, while being good enough to pass, was not stellar. More importantly, I did not feel good about myself and my work.

Ironically, it was one work afternoon, as I was wasting more time than is reasonable reading an Ars Technica article about how RSS feeds are profoundly detrimental to one’s productivity, that I came across an elliptical reader’s comment about the Pomodoro technique. Not having heard of it before, I was intrigued enough to google the term, and came across Francesco Cirillo’s website.

To those unfamiliar with it, the Pomodoro technique is a time-management method not unrelated to time-boxing. The key principle is to come up with an indivisible unit of effort, called the Pomodoro, which becomes the founding block for an activity-driven approach to plowing through one’s to-do list. A Pomodoro lasts 30 minutes, of which 5 minutes are break time; and it is non-negotiable. If you get interrupted to the point that you have to draw your attention away from the task at hand, the Pomodoro becomes void; you’ll have to start it again. Every four Pomodoros, you take a longer break, of up to one Pomodoro in duration. This dominatrix-mistress approach to time management has one immediate benefit: it gives you a rigid framework to abide by, short enough to not seem daunting (a key factor in procrastination) and long enough to be productive.

Why call it a Pomodoro rather than a half-hour? Well, that’s the trick – the Pomodoro is a unit of effort, not time. Any activity may require two Pomodoros to complete, or five or ten, it doesn’t matter; what does matter is that you, the Pomodoro practitioner, put in one unit of effort at a time, with just enough break time for mental relaxation and learning reinforcement. This essentially turns any long, drawn-out intellectual production process into discrete, reasonable chunks that are a lot more appealing to the lazy or overworked mind. It also provides an alternative to the frenzied, and ultimately very unproductive, multitasking; Pomodoros give a clear and focused objective that requires exclusive attention from the brain, albeit for a short period of time.

I will not go into more details about the technique itself -refer to the free PDF on Francesco Cirillo’s website for that- but rather on the experience of subjecting myself to the practice.

The magic started when I casually read through the first few pages of the manual:

If we try to measure ourselves against the passage of time, we feel inadequate, oppressed, enslaved, defeated, more and more with every second that goes by. We lose our élan vital, our vital contact, which enables us to accomplish things. “Two hours have gone by and I’m still not done; two days have gone by and I’m still not done.”

This is exactly how I felt at the time; a slave to the ticking clock, too unmotivated to get any real work done, and too guilty to enjoy the unproductive time either. Incoming e-mails about trivial matters became welcome excuses to do something vaguely work-related, removing a bit of that guilt without actually achieving anything meaningful. Wikipedia and its infinite cultural maze became my place of debauchery, where I would waste more time than I really could afford. And yet the inexorable passage of time, in the form of a computer clock, a wristwatch, or the dimming daylight outside, would remind me that there was no escaping this denial of reality. Something had to give, and Francisco Cirillo’s depiction of our slavery to time was a call to action.

I downloaded Codenauts’ Pomodoro for iPad, and used it as a geeky version of a kitchen timer (the only physical tool you’ll need to apply the Pomodoro technique). The first task which I applied the method to was, unsurprisingly, writing this blog entry (full disclosure: it ended up taking four Pomodoros). I quickly realized one of the benefits of the technique: it makes an activity fun. Doing one Pomodoro of pretty much anything can’t be really boring, because it’s a short, focused effort; it sounds like a fun challenge in fact, and once it is completed, well, you are 25 minutes closer to the completion of the activity. There are two small treats to reward you at the end – the 5-minute break (which, importantly, should not involve anything that exerts the mind), and adding a checkmark next to the activity (not signaling the end of the activity, but only that you’ve just completed another Pomodoro of it). Also, the system is fair – you can’t deviate from the task at hand for 25 minutes, but it also requires that you stop all work once the timer goes off, even if you were close to being done. I then realized the second benefit of the technique: it acts as a mental coach that forces you into a discipline, while not requiring too much willpower. A bit like this 10-minute daily workout that promises to give you fab abs in just two weeks, except that this one actually works. Just keep in mind that for the technique to work, much like the gym discipline, you have to at least want to improve – Pomodoro is not going to magically rehabilitate a reluctant sloth.

An unnatural aspect of getting into the Pomodoro discipline is in crafting very detailed to-do lists. Most of us have used to-do lists at some point in our academic or professional lives; but the tasks we log are generally macro in nature (write this paper, read that book, etc.). Pomodoro encourages offloading your mind of all the more tactical, nitty-gritty actions of the daily life. If your current Pomodoro is interrupted (internally) by a rumbling stomach, log an unplanned interruption titled, “grab lunch”, and set it with today’s date. Regardless of the nature of the thought, if it’s significant enough to interrupt your concentration, note it down and assign it a tentative deadline; quite often you’ll realize that such tasks can be put off to the next day, or even week (okay, maybe not lunch). I found this approach unnatural because my inclination was to use my brain as a staging area for all these below-the-radar tasks that don’t seem to suck up real time (e.g. check e-mail); but if you force yourself to log them, you will decrease the creeping anxiety from brain overload, and you will also get a chance to reflect, in retrospect, on the number of interruptions that you’ve had to suffer in your workday. Over time, allegedly, you should get better at prioritizing, scheduling, fighting back interruptions, and assessing the duration of tasks – in other words, you should become more productive. Such payback makes it worth the overhead of the technique.

Now, there are a few more significant concepts to the Pomodoro technique -again, reading the PDF will provide all the details- and I am doing it injustice by writing only a cursory overview. The technique includes guidelines on how to make the break time more conducive to memorizing lessons learned, how to rearrange priorities based on unexpected tasks coming up, how to handle interruptions, how to generate meaningful reporting on time consumption, etc. But overall the effort required to understand and test-run the technique -a few hours, at most- may be well worth the payback if Pomodoro turns out to work well for you. It sure has for me.