There’s a famous technique for increasing your productivity
that has been popping up on my social media radar for a few weeks now. I’ve
been meaning to give it a try, but just haven’t dedicated the time to do so
until today.
Which is ironic, because the technique is as simple as setting
aside a specific amount of time to do a specific task. I should have used the
technique to try the technique. Then we would be calling this post Pomception.
The Pomodoro Technique – so named for the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that its creator utilized – is an
easy mind-hack that trains you to get into a routine of working in short
segments with regular breaks to keep your motivation fresh. The original
formula utilizes twenty five minutes of uninterrupted work, followed by a five
minute rest period. This pattern repeats until you have completed four circuits
for a total of 120 minutes. Before you know it, you’ve been chugging away at
your project for two hours.
If you’re anything like me, you can sometimes feel like
setting aside any number of hours to work on your stories is just too
overwhelming to handle on a day to day basis. Even on a week to week basis.
Time gets away from you and suddenly almost a whole month has gone by without
anything but the occasional, guilty thought of “I should probably work on that.
Hello Facebook.”
But the beauty of the Pomodoro Technique is that it can, if
anything, help you manage that fear of the great burden that writing can be. For
anyone who is trying to write a novel (or attempting to tackle any enormous
task, for that matter) you know how intimidating it can be to get started. You
don’t have to think about all of that work if you just never get going in the
first place!
That’s the easiest way to defeat ourselves before we’ve even
begun, isn’t it? So we have to ease into it.
You might not be able to drum up the motivation to write for
two hours, but you can push through writing for twenty five minutes. You can
probably endure just about anything for twenty five minutes with the right
mindset. And once you’ve done it once, it’s even easier to
reset that timer and go for another round.
The thing is, you will never get to the point where writing
for two hours becomes easy if you don’t first try breaking it down into more
manageable chunks. We have to start with the shorter runs first before we can
entertain the idea of racing in a marathon.
One of the other perks of practicing the Pomodoro Technique is
that it breaks your habit of retreating into distractors, like social media or unnecessary
research. When the timer is running, you are not allowed to do anything but
focus on your task, or if you cannot do that, you must instead stare at the
wall and think about it. This may sound intimidating, but what it really
accomplishes is it releases you from the pressure of the time limit. So what if
you don’t get any words on the page for the first round? You just spent twenty
five minutes thinking about your story, digesting your current problems – and you
didn’t spend that same twenty five minutes dribbling your brain cells down the
latest Buzzfeed gif-set.
I challenge you to give it a try, not just for one day, but
for several days in a row. See how more relaxing writing becomes when you take the
pressure to perform off of yourself for extended periods of time. How many
Pomodoros can you string together?
If you are in need of a timer, there are plenty of online clocks that you can use. This one was specifically designed with the Pomodoro Technique in mind, so you can have
it running perpetually in 25 and 5 minute increments – or you can customize it
yourself with different work/rest intervals (warning: it's a bit glitchy, so it might not be as consistent as you'd prefer).
For myself, I gave the Pomodoro Technique my first try
today, and so far I have only managed to make it through two cycles. But I’m
already impressed, because it took me out of a three week slump and forced me
to sit down with my document in front of me and really pay attention to it. I
realized that I’m a little bit stuck right now: I have fifteen pages to meet
before I can wrap up this first chapter, but I only have enough story in mind to
fill maybe five or six of those. I need to brainstorm about what I can do with
those other ten pages. So while I only wrote about three hundred and fifty
words (!!), I was able to address my current hurdle and think of ways to
overcome it. I can promise you, once this blog post goes live, I’ll be turning
back to my tomato and trying to figure out how to proceed.
I’ll get back with you all as the days progress! Let me know
in the comments how the Pomodoro Technique has worked (or not worked) for you!
What’s your favorite way to overcome the stress of writing?
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