Productivity #

When I started the journey of studying part-time and working full-time, I quickly discovered that time would inexplicably disappear from the day. The document I started at 9am was still blank at 10am or I'd read the same sentence over and over again or I'd read the same sentence over and over again or I'd read the same sentence over and over again or I'd read the same sentence over and over again or I'd read the same sentence over and over again....

Like a good technologist, I threw away everything working and replaced it with cloud-based technology. Unsurprisingly, that didn't work. Shock! Horror!

With the baby and bathwater approach out of the way, I fired up DuckDuckGo, and I started to research my specific problem, which led me to this Thomas Frank YouTube video on procrastination. There apparently was a straightforward solution, the Pomodoro Technique.

Pomodoro #

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a timer to break work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a Pomodoro, from the Italian word for tomato, after Cirillo's tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a university student.

The next day I downloaded a simple Pomodoro timer on my phone and started my journey. Pomodoro has undoubtedly made me more productive. I've discovered over time that it doesn't work for me for every task, but it works for writing, researching and reading tasks.

Apps #

After discovering that the Pomodoro technique worked for me, I cycled through a couple of Pomodoros and found the Android App Forest which has an intriguing hook.

"Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause your tree to die. Stay focused daily and turn hard work into a land of lush forest." - Forest Website

I found the visualisation of the forest growing quite rewarding. As an added bonus, the Forest team partners with a real-tree-planting organisation and together, they have planted over 1.2 million real trees.

There is also a Chrome extension for Forest, which can block certain websites when Pomodoros are active.