25:00: time to focus! 24:53: short break for reset; enable notification alerts;

You may ‘Start’ now…

20:15: it’s time for a longer break;

Stop kicking the can down the road and find ways to be gainful. You might just get away from being looked upon as a messy, couch potato creep who’s crawling lazy and always falls behind others! Here’s how…

As the clock strikes midnight, your run-up for the day begins. It will keep ticking for another 86400 times before packing for the day to pick-up a new one!  Aren’t you tardy and a little behind time? You’ve already splurged close to 25000 secs lying fast asleep in bed. There’s so much to do and not enough time to finish.

Now, you’re all worked up and worry if you could somehow find help to wrap up the stint you’ve been working on; study, writing, or coding- it feels like you’re living on borrowed time. “I thought I’d finish work in time. That might have helped…but “!

Nothing to get peevish over except that you’ll stand guilty as charged of procrastinating and hamming it up. Your claim that you could easily finish the task will be sounded out as utterly unreal and way off being realistic. As if that isn’t enough, you’ll be flagged as a reckless destructive crass who always falls short in managing his time. And all the while you’ve been thinking you’ve done enough to fix that damn ‘frittering’ syndrome and dealt with your jinx!  Still you keep crashing out miserably each time you stretch out.

It’s gross and exasperating!

Still I think it’s Ok to fail trying than to die away doing nothing. And I guess… trying yet one more time doesn’t hurt anybody.

It’s intriguing in content…I mean this issue of prioritization and productivity. So I decided to dig back into the history a little. A fascinating ‘inverting time’ concept where time changes from a negative something; apparently lost— to a possible positive representation of an event, caught my attention and I travelled back to a 130 page revelation about ‘Working smarter, not harder’ by Francesco Cirillo who like most of us was a complete spoilsport when it came to studies and completing assignments. He knew little of little of anything let alone find a way to manage time. So when the idea of using of a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (pomodoro in Italian)- that so nonchalantly hit him one day while prepping meal in galley-it was more accidental than a serious shot at innovating something. But what followed next was to change his life and of countless others forever!

It all started as a feather-brained hack where he’d set a two-minute timer and challenge himself to stay focused for that duration. Curiously this was set to be later used to channel time and train the brain to stay focused by chipping off some extra length of time that’s otherwise taken to stay tuned. It didn’t end here; short breaks meant to switch off after-efforts, gave him precious minutes to realign and adjust if things didn’t go well in the first instance!

Cirillo had then moved on to five… 10 and later 25 minutes followed by a five-minute break; which he thought was fair enough optimal time interval. This meant that ‘anything less than this was too short a time to get anything done, while an hour-long was way too long’.

And this is when the ‘tomato timer’ birthed.

This is something that you too can do to wriggle out of your daily struggle to be productive. Jeez…haven’t you had enough off being badly road-rolled and knocked around with a ton of tasks to finish and do not know how to complete them?  As a matter of fact you run a serious risk of an early burn-out and a steep backslide. So, try your hand on this fancy hourglass for some dramatic results. Doing so would eliminate procrastination from your life and ensure that you stay focused on one task at a time allowing you to work in short bursts of time with short breaks in between.

Pen a draft, knock out a proposal, complete a graphic design project, or dash-off a complex code; breaking your work into 25-minute chunks is hugely beneficial and the pause in between would let you review the progress you’ve made so far with fresh eyes to make adjustments where necessary.

What’s even better is how easy it is to begin! Simply find a timer (the one on your phone will work fine), and get going. If you’re looking for something more legit, explore the likes of Focus booster, Pomello, Toggl, Clockwork Tomato, Focus to-do. Using a Pomodoro tracker feels edgy at first but after several days your variables will make you wonder why you didn’t pick it up earlier; you may have saved yourself a lot of troubles!  Getting something done on time and ticking it off your to-do list can be extremely satisfying.

On the other hand little distractions have the distinction of derailing whole work day in a flash. This would have lots of open ended work left unfinished and would seemingly drag on endlessly. But if you’re keen to work past the point of optimal order and timing, you’d better build up an appetite for ‘tomatoes’. Like so, it would save the day for you and set plans for you with gamified objectives and gumptious ends!

Begin by breaking down complex projects in smaller actionable steps. Stay close to this rule and some clear progress is sure to happen since small tasks go together to a bigger end. So combine simpler ones together and ace it. But before that ….

Set the timer to ring at all times since ‘pomodoro’ is an indivisible unit of time and cannot be broken; certainly not for checking incoming mails, team chats or text messaging.  In the moment, it might seem easy for you to justify these internal pulls; “This email is too important to wait,” or “It’ll take only less than a minute to check my Twitter; that not a real distraction…Ok!”

Of course, anything that comes up in between needs to be returned to later. A digital to-do-list to keep track is fine but a pen and paper will do as well. Perish the thought but these small interruptions would lie low and be messy later! You have to take note of them.

But it’s not just the time lost; it’s also the time and energy you’ll need before your lost attention settles down and goes live again. After switching gears, our minds stay absorbed with the previous calling for well over 20 minutes before it gathers wits fully. Indulging the impulse to check Face book “even for a minute“ is like blowing away some 20 minutes of trying before you could get back on rails.

Make it a 5 minute break if the disruption is imminent; keep track of the time lost and reflect how best to avoid them next time. See… each break is a chance to reset and bring your attention back to what you should be working on. It makes you become more aware of where and how you’re spending your time.

Nevertheless, if you get to finish before the timer goes off, reach out for some over learning or spend this extra time reading up on professional knowledge to improve on your skill set.

Guess what…at the end of the day you’ll be too ready to believe that good things do happen to you too and how much you can get done in a day!

All you need to do is …jumpstart your day by thinking in ‘tomatoes’ rather than hours!