Focusing on the Process Instead of the Results – A Second Look at the Pomodoro Technique

“It’s easy to start associating success for your day with accomplishing your plan exactly as first envisioned, and to label any other outcome as a failure.”

So says Cal Newport, established blogger and work-method guru, and when it comes to writing, he couldn’t be more spot on.

It can be so discouraging to sit down with a set goal in mind and be unable to meet that goal. No matter how long you tried, and no matter how much you actually produced, you still feel as if you are a failure because you didn’t make it to the finish line you had set before you started running.

Didn't they tell you? The race ended two miles ago.

I have been employing the Pomodoro Technique for the past couple of weeks, when I am able to set aside time to work on my novel, and it has helped so much with not only giving me the motivation to work for a continuous amount of time, but also with helping me to acknowledge that my ideas for what a reasonable writing session might be are not actually that reasonable.

I have not written fiction every day in years (I have spoken before on my opinions of whether writing every day or not is a technique suited for everyone). And as a result, I have gotten out of shape. The words don’t flow as easily as they once did. I am not able to produce pages and pages of content in one day like I once did.

But, I also have to admit that when I was sitting down and chugging out a few thousand words a day, those sections were not very clean or very intuitive. It was a growing process for me, for sure, but none of the writing that I did back then is publishable. I avoid reading it now because I see the painful growth of a youthful writer learning how to wield the pen. It’s not pretty.

So I’m trying to congratulate myself on my most recent writing sessions, which produced about nine hundred words a piece. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but the words are on the page, ready to be fine-tuned at a later date – an accomplishment for anyone who is trying to move forward with a project! And if a writer gets 900-1000 words written every day, they could have a completed, 100,000 word novel finished within three and a half months.

That’s really quite good, actually!

Besides, chances are good that the more you keep at it, the faster you’ll become. You’ll get back into the rhythm before you know it. Even if you don’t, though, there’s no reason to consider yourself a bad writer just because you take your time. 

So don’t despair over the minor details of what or how much you produce. The fact that you are producing anything at all is wonderful! You can flesh out and fine tune everything you write later. But you can’t fix what isn’t there. Grant yourself the victories where they’re due.