Struggling to Get Things Done?
Posted On: 2016-02-04
It's one of those things about working online. We have a heap of work to get through every day and yet distractions are just a mouse click away.
We don't even have to get up from our desks to find distractions and they can take us away from our work for hours. There is a meme that appears on Facebook from time to time that is so true ... you can go to Youtube to find out how to do something and four hours later you're still there and learning how to talk to giraffes.
And it doesn't have to be Youtube; you can go to one of our industry message boards and end up spending the rest of the day chasing rabbits down holes. The temptation is always there and if you're doing something fairly boring it becomes almost impossible not to give in to that temptation.
So what is the solution? Well I guess you can be like one guy I knew who just couldn't stay off GFY. He programmed his computer to blank screen if he tried to access that message board. That might seem a little extreme but it was what he needed to stay focused.
There's no doubt that is an extreme solution but If you don't want to go to that extreme there may be a solution that involves establishing a new habit ... and once something becomes a habit it becomes easy to do.
To establish that new habit, you need to use a technique called Pomodoro. That rather weird name becomes even stranger when I tell you that Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato. You might wonder what a tomato has to do with staying focused so let me tell you a little bit about the tomato technique and all will be revealed.
The Pomodoro Technique is all about time management and it was developed in the 1980's by a university student who used a kitchen timer ... in the shape of a tomato ... to break his work down into set periods.
The student would set his tomato shaped timer for 25 minutes and he would spend that time focused only on the work that he had to do. When the 25 minutes was up the timer would ring and the student would take a three to four-minute break.
At the end of that short break he would reset the timer for another 25 minutes and then do nothing but work. He called each 25-minute period a Pomodoro and when he had done four promodoros ... or a set ... he would take a 15 to 30-minute break.
Does it really work? Well I have to say that I rarely get a whole 25 minutes to work on anything without interruptions. The phone rings, staff have questions, people walk through the door and expect to see me straight away so finding 25 uninterrupted minutes is like finding the back door to Fort Knox.
However, some people I know rave about this system and say that it has increased their productivity way beyond anything they thought possible and now they brag about how many sets they can get done in a day.
Will it work for you? Well I guess that depends on how well you can cut yourself off from outside interruptions. You might be able to resist the temptation to surf the web instead of work but if you're like me and have lots of outside interruptions then it is probably not going to work so well.
But if you work alone and you can shut the world out then the Pomodoro Technique might be just what you need ... as long as you can ignore the constant ticking of the timer. And if you can keep using the Pomodoro Technique for a couple of weeks it will become a habit.
The cost of trying the Pomodoro Technique isn't going to kill you either. How much are kitchen timers? A few dollars is all you're going to need to buy a reliable timer and then it's just a matter of staying focused for each 25 minute period.
Can you do that? If you can't then your business is going to be in trouble because time is the one thing in this world that is finite. You can't gain extra time, you can't find it hiding in a cave, and you sure can't buy it in a convenient pressure pack.
The only thing that you can do is make more efficient use of the time you have and if you need a kitchen timer to help you do that then race out and buy one right now.