Pomodoro Technique: Taking Breaks to Focus
Try to answer this honestly: the last time you sat down to study or do some work, how many minutes were you able to focus before getting distracted by some external factor (emails, Insta notifications, TV noise, etc)? For most, its somewhere around 15–20 mins. Even for me, its around 20 mins max!
In this growing age of tech, productivity, and focus of the usual kind has gone to the dogs. Our brain finds it extremely difficult to resist a ping on our smartphone and before we realize we are halfway there to grab it and check our notifications. The sad truth is that this happens to almost everyone and a happier truth is that you and your brain could both fight this off with a little effort.
Introducing the Pomodoro Technique.
Set a timer for 25 minutes and focus your entire attention and energy on the task in front of you. Put your smartphone and other electronics on flight mode, if that works for you. For the next 25 minutes, you will be focusing on just this one task. We call this 25 minutes session also as one Pomodoro session. After the 25 minutes, you can take a 5-minute break and lose yourself to all the social media feed and emails out there. Make sure to start another Pomodoro session after your short break without procrastinating.
You could either use an app like Flora or Forest on your smartphone for this or simply an old-school Stopwatch/Timer on your wrist-watch. For those working on computers, there are applications like Focus Booster and Toggl Desktop (manual time tracker). The choice is yours.
Just a 5 minutes break might seem difficult at first but over time, our mind will get wired around this new habit that rewards us with 5 mins of gratification followed by 25 minutes of tough work. Slowly, your mind gets used to small breaks and longer work times. Isn’t that great? Defintely, it works for me and you should try it out too.
Takeaway: You don’t need to sit down to work for 3 hours and get distracted half of the time. Instead, use the Pomodoro Technique!
-Aditya Darekar
