The Pomodoro Technique
One of the Computer Science modules that I teach, known as TM112, includes a short section on the Pomodoro technique as a study aid. I was vaguely aware of this technique before starting to teach it, but since we are encouraging students to use it I thought I should “eat my own dogfood” as the saying has it and give it go, especially I often have difficulty staying on task…
I didn’t actually buy a tomato timer, I have several devices that I can talk to that can set up timers so that was easy. I had been keeping an informal task list in a “Todo” app, but decided that it should be much more formal and that almost everything I needed to should be a task. (I even wrote a Python program that takes as input all my tutorials and TMA submission dates and generates as output a CSV file that has every activity I need to do for them! - But that’s a subject for a different article post).
This pomodoro technique also suggests that you make some estimate of the size of a task - some will take at least one pomodoro, some can be grouped together and others are “fill-in” tasks that you can use to do something productive if you have some time left over. Unfortunately my “Todo” doesn’t really have a convenient “size” field, so I abused the “priority” field, which it does support, to have the following meanings:
“High Priority” - this task will take at least one pomodoro (i.e. >= 25 mins)
“Low Priority”- this is a quick task, I can fit several of these into one pomodoro
“Normal Priority” - this is a substantial, but not time critical “fill-in” task (like reading up on the next block, or reading the user manual for some software or programming language - yes, I am that sad!)
So we are all set - timers, tasks, lets go!
~~~ some weeks pass ~~~
Okay, so here are my conclusions (in no particular order)
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Once you start counting them, the number of interruptions is quite surprising - I work from home so my interruptions included: - The family - “what do we want for lunch?”, “where did you put the scissors?”, “can you help move the sofa for a video call…” - Deliveries - in one 5 minute period 2 separate deliveries and the postman wanting to know whether I’d found the delivery he’d left in the box that morning… - The cat - “tickle me”; “feed me”, “no, not that food, the other food”, “I’ve been out for a pee, can I tell you about it?…” - Email and discord notifications - This was the only one under my control so I turned them off!
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Accepting that it is OK to take regular, short breaks is a good thing, setting a timer for them is even better
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Understanding the size of tasks and listing everything that I needed to do was really, really helpful
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Even if I only had a few minutes there was usually something useful I could find to do, and complete
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Knowing that I was making progress on the big tasks was good, even if I didn’t manage the full tomato
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Crossing completed tasks off the list gives you a warm feeling!
So, in summary, I think that trying to strictly follow the Pomodoro technique only really works if you are fully in control of your time for substantial parts of the day; but understanding the size of the tasks facing you, and being able to make progress against them in small increments is really helpful.