The magic of the pomodoro timer
It’s been an impossibly busy last four weeks for me. I’ve been line producing two different projects at the same time, each one taking up about two thirds of a work day. This adds up to four thirds of a work day, six days a week, for the last month.
Let me tell you about my saving grace: the pomodoro timer.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Pomodoro Method, it’s nothing complex. All you do is start a timer for a short window of time and work on only one thing until it goes off. Many people recommend setting your timer for 25 minutes, then taking a five-minute break. I choose to set my timer for 45 to 75 minutes, depending on how much I like what I’m working on.
The battle of line producing is that a dozen different things need your attention all at once. You have to parse out which one is the most urgent, choose to work on that, and then get it done. The battle multiplies when you’re line producing two projects because you have two clients who need urgent answers from you.
This is why a pomodoro timer is so helpful, especially for those with varying degrees of ADHD. Sure, you could set one up on your phone or your desktop, and I often do in a pinch. But nothing works as well as a singular-use-case physical object. I set it with my hands and place it in front of my computer screen, just above my keyboard. As I work, any number of opportunities and emergencies and distractions come my way. But the timer sits there, unchanged, reminding me of the one high-priority task I identified. It challenges me, daring me to finish before it beeps.
If you’re thinking about getting a pomodoro timer, why not pick up this one today? At $25, the math makes it worthwhile pretty quickly. Let’s say it turns an otherwise distracted hour into a productive hour just once per week. If your hourly rate is $25, it pays for itself in one week. A month of use brings a 4x return on investment. A year brings a 52x ROI.
In fact, a pomodoro timer might be the highest ROI business investment you make this year.
