Mark Stedman (0:00)

It's 4:00 in the afternoon and you're thinking over your day. You sent a bunch of emails, had a couple of meetings, took a phone call, got some lunch, got distracted by a song on the radio and watched a video playlist of a cat that thinks he's people. As you think back through your day, did you actually get anything done or were you just reacting to a bunch of distractions? I'm Mark Stedman and this is Undo, where we investigate productivity methods through the ages and try to separate the brilliant from the bullshit so you can build a system that works for you. Hands up. Who thinks young people's attention spans have gone to crap? Everything is instant and opinions have to be black and white because there's simply no time for nuance. Thing is, every generation criticizes the next one. Hike up your jeans, unplug your Walkman. That screen will rot your brain. Get your head out of that tapestry. There's a strong argument to be made that our attention spans haven't changed. Teenagers aren't suddenly incapable of focusing. Instead, media has got more savvy about grabbing attention and younger brains are becoming better at switching between platforms. Goodbye, sweet, sweet neuroplasticity. I wasted all my best brain cells on middle eight raps from 90s pop songs. I don't know where yours went. All of this to say if you've ever felt like you can't focus, the pathology behind it might be less neurochemical and more sociological. So maybe give yourself and your nephew Dylan some slack. We're all just trying to make our way in a noisy world. That said, if you've got a chunk of work to get through and you just can't find the focus, then let me introduce you to Francesco. Francesco Cirillo is studying for a sociology exam. It's September 1987. He's surrounded by books and writing implements, but he just can't get his brain to stay on the same track for more than a couple of minutes. As soon as he thinks, right, that's it. Time to really focus up and get this work done. Into his head pops a whole fully formed to do list of other work he needs to do. For one thing, he could get his desk in order after all. Tidy desk, tidy mind. Then he'd best sharpen all his pencils so when he's in the thick of note taking, he he isn't getting bogged down by a blunt implement. Having done all that, he heads to the kitchen to make a snack. As he's scanning the countertops, his eyes hit on a little tomato shaped kitchen timer. In the days before smart speakers and smart watches and smartphones, dumb little devices like these were vital in making sure the sauce didn't burn and the pasta didn't turn to wallpaper paste. I'm not saying that because he's Italian. I'm saying that because he's a student, and students love pasta. I love pasta anyway. Francesco made a humble bet with himself. Can you stay focused for two minutes without distraction? He asked. So he grabbed the timer, wound it up, let it go, and picked up his book. There on that table in September 1987, he says, I hadn't noticed yet, but for the first time, I had managed to turn time into an ally. Exactly at the moment when time appeared to be such a vicious predator to me, I managed to stop in front of it and still unafraid, ask this simple how can you time be useful to me now? It worked. He found that he could focus for two minutes. So he experimented with different durations all the way up to an hour. After a while, he settled on 25 minutes as the optimal amount, with five minutes for a break. And thus the pomodoro technique was born. Pomodoro being the Italian word for tomato. 31 years have passed since that September afternoon in 1987. Many things have changed since then. The most prolific source of distractions remains our own mind. The sudden desire to order a pizza, update your social media status, or clean your desk. The best approach to dealing with these interruptions is to accept them and treat them in a gentle way. This method of time management is extremely simple. You set a timer. It doesn't have to be in the shape of a tomato for 25 minutes. During those 25 minutes, your head's down. In work mode, you should be working on one thing and one thing alone. If that one thing is triaging your inbox. The key is to make a note of tasks you need to follow up on. Rather rather than getting sidetracked, a good tip here is when your brain throws something up and it probably will jot it down somewhere and come back to it later, don't assume you'll remember it and don't try to bat it away. Writing it down assures your brain that you're taking care of it. Once the 25 minute timer goes off, reset it for 5 minutes. This is your downtime. Take a break, get up, have a stretch, do whatever you need to do to just clean the pipes for a few minutes. Don't focus on anything productive. And then once the 5 minutes are up, reset it back to 25 and begin the cycle again. Each unit of 25 minutes is called a pomodoro, and the plural, rather pleasingly, is pomodori. The plan is to achieve 10 Pomodori a day for a little over four hours of focused productivity. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, should get in the way. While you're in pomodoro mode, unless your house is on fire, you do what the timer says. If you find yourself getting distracted halfway through a 25 minute sprint, cancel the timer and start again. Just like broken biscuits have no calories, half finished pomodori do not count if you finish your work with time still left on the tomato. Per the rules, you must keep going. Double check your work. Don't switch to a new task, just review the task you're currently on. If that sounds a bit bonkers to you, you're not alone. But them's the rules. And speaking of rules, as strict as those focused sprints are, you must also make sure to take your breaks. Apart from just giving it some slack. This strict adherence to downtime teaches your brain that it only has to knuckle down for short periods at a time. If you start skipping breaks, it becomes easier for your brain to procrastinate because it no longer has any time boundaries in which to stick a single track. After you've finished four Pomodori, take a longer break for 15 to 30 minutes. You'll have been going for two hours at that point and it'll probably be time for lunch or second breakfast or pre dinner. There's not much else to it, but there are some little tweaks and techniques that can help. First off, there are lots of pomodoro style apps you can get for your smartphone or watch. Amazon is full of analog and digital timers you can buy if you prefer to have something physical. Next up, you need three lists. I suspect over the weeks and months to come we'll talk a lot about how you plan your days, but you'll do well with this technique if you start off with a firm list of the stuff you want to work on and how many pomodori you'll need for each task. Writing a blog post, for example, might be 2 Pomodori, 1 Pomodoro to knock up a quick promo image in Canva for pomodori to code up a new feature in your app. Actually coding is where this sort of technique works well because you're not having to constantly switch between media writing is much the same but if you work in a multimedia environment, you're probably going to come up against some issues. I'm not going to leave you hanging on those. We'll get to them after this brief diversion. This podcast is supported directly by you. If you'd like to show your support for Undo and keep it free of ads, you can become a member of the Undo Book Club over at Undo FM Club. In return, you'll get extra bonus podcast content. And every month I'll deliver an in depth review of a much lauded self help book so you can extract all the good stuff without the waffle. This month we're doing Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Membership costs $5 a month and all the info you could ever need is@ undo fm/club. Okay, let's get back to it. Going back to our lists for a second, I said you needed three lists. There's your daily to do list, which we've just covered, but those tasks are pulled from your inventory. This is the larger list of stuff you need to get done now or later. This is the seemingly inexhaustible list of things you're supposed to do, which means it's time for me to once again remind you you're never gonna get it all done. Your brain is not a good place to keep all of those tasks, so best put them down somewhere. Then you can build out each day and plan your pomodori. The final list is Where Interruptions go. Like I said earlier, if your brain pings you with a sudden urge to rewatch a specific YouTube video, or you've just thought of a great post for Blue sky, make a note of it in your interruptions list. Then get right back to the job at hand. Once your timer goes off, check your interruptions list and see if there's anything there that actually needs doing. You might find that the urge to watch that video has died down now, and that Blue sky post idea can be added to your inventory or tackled on today's to do list. The same technique works for interruptions from the outside world too. Unless something's about to actually explode, it can probably wait 25 minutes. That includes your colleagues. Okay, Janet from Accounts Receivable really needs you to urgently finish your timesheet. Does it need to be done right this second, or could it wait like 15 minutes until you finish the job at hand? It's probably number two, so back off, Janet. You don't have to be weird and tell people I'm stuck in a pomodoro, by the way. You can just say I'm just in the middle of something right now, but give me 10 minutes and I'll give you a ring back. Oliver berkman, author of 4,000 Weeks and who I'm dubbing patron saint of this podcast, although he's yet to actively patronize it, wrote in praise of the Pomodoro technique back in 2020. It took him a while to figure out what the fuss was about, but it's from Oliver that I get the notion we're never going to reach the bottom of our to do list. So he likes the Pomodoro technique because it embraces limitations. Oliver joins the ranks of authors, entrepreneurs and productivity experts who like this little tomato. But while in the face of it, the idea of deep focus is a really good one, there are lots of lines of work, creative and otherwise, that just aren't compatible. If you like dividing your time up into equal units, or you're essentially in front of a keyboard all day, the Pomodoro technique can be a useful one. It can also be good for learning an instrument or a language. After all, Cirillo used it to help him study for an exam. But if your work relies on a degree of flow, stopping arbitrarily every half hour is not ideal. Writing a report at work or even a personal newsletter is the kind of task that can get a little mechanical and methodical, and those bursts of focus can help you power through it. But if you're painting a landscape or composing a symphony, like I was hinting at earlier, you're unlikely to settle into that all important flow state. By the way, we'll talk about flow state in more detail next week. But if your work spans different media, like making a YouTube video, you can and should break this job into smaller increments. Writing the video might take you an hour, so that's two Pomodori. Shooting each scene could be a single pomodoro of 25 minutes each. If you find the technique useful and want to stick with it, you'll get better at estimating how long stuff will take so you can plan your day with relative accuracy. But I'm not here to present every idea as one you should adopt. That'd be like studying 80 different ways to boil an egg, but never actually getting around to eating one. So if this doesn't feel like it works for you, no worries. I definitely think it's worth a try, though, especially if you find it hard to focus on boring work or there's just something more interesting to do with your time. And on the face of it. Some of these techniques can feel a bit samey, but you're not a machine if you can carve up your day, so you've got a good mix of long and short tasks that'll help keep your brain more interested and thus a little more well behaved. If you need to write a presentation and it's going to take you 8 Pomodori, sprinkle in a couple of other short jobs like paying some bills or ideally something fun like researching your next holiday. So maybe try it tonight. If you heard last week's episode about eating your frog, you'd have heard me talk about planning planning your day in terms of priority. Well, another way is to plan your day in terms of Pomodori. Start with the stuff that'll give you a head start on the day. Plan for a mix of long and short work, and don't forget to take your breaks. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. I added a bit of colour to Francesco Cirillo's Moment of Invention at the beginning, but if you want to know more about him and the technique, you can head to Undo FM Pomodoro or follow the link in the show notes from there, you can also sign up to the Undo newsletter so those resources land along with the episode right in your inbox. Every Monday, right after this break, I'm going to share with you some of my thoughts from putting the Pomodoro technique into practice, so stick around for that next week. Like I said, we'll talk about flow state, which will give me just enough time to wrap my lips and tongue around a very important name. If you know, you know. In the meantime, you can find me all over the Internet at Hello Stedman, I'd love to hear from you, so don't be shy. Back with you after this brief but important message. This here is not a commercial message, but a thank you. The response to the first few episodes of Undo has been nothing short of amazing. So to anyone and everyone who's binged the back catalogue or shared them with a friend, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you like the show but aren't in a position to support it financially, just telling people about it is the best way to help it grow. And if you ever have any questions or feedback for an episode, Hellodo FM is where you can find me. Alrighty, let's get to the shed. So you join me in the shed for a little bit more of an informal look at this particular technique. If this works well, I'll do it for other episodes But I definitely had some thoughts on this that I wanted to be able to share with you in a less sort of documentary format, if you like. And having tried this over the years, the one thing that I really think is relevant here is that it is for work that you don't really necessarily want to do, or you don't feel great about doing, or you just need that extra, extra kick of motivation to do. So I mentioned in the main piece that if you're doing artistic work and that's the work that you really want to do, you probably don't need this. You probably don't need necessarily a productivity technique like this. Maybe there are other things that you need to do. Maybe you need to find ways to actually bring yourself out of flow or to help you get into flow. And like I said a couple of times now, we'll talk about flow next week, but this is a tool that is really good for. You know what, I've just got to power through some stuff today. I've got a bunch of work. Maybe it is creative in some sense, but there is that sort of mechanical element. And maybe you either just, you've got to get through it, you've got to get this deadline written, I think it's great for writing, or it's just work that you don't want to do particularly. And so because you're thinking of it in 25 minute bursts, I do tend to find it actually works quite well. And I've made it very simple to set them up on my watch. I just have a couple of timers that are right at the top of my Apple watch. So I can just go into the timers, select my 25, get going, I'll get a buzz on my wrist, finish what I'm doing, finish the thought, I'll make a quick log, which I'll talk about in a sec, and then start the five minute timer, take a break, watch a YouTube video, get up, have a stretch, have a wee, whatever. And the logging thing I think is really good. So if you are perhaps a freelancer or like I said in the piece, Janet from Accounts Receivable wants to know your timesheet. Getting down to the half hour level. In some cases, it's not granular enough for everyone. You know, lots of people tend to think in 15 minutes, but if you're essentially thinking in half hour increments, then being able to make a quick log again, because the idea is mono tasking with the Pomodoro technique, the idea is that you are doing one thing at a Time and again. I'll talk about that in a sec. But for that kind of thing, keeping a very simple little log, a little table somewhere, could even be on a bit of line, note, paper, note down the time, just the briefest descriptions of what you did or the client project you worked on or whatever. Once you're out of that moment, I think it's really helpful because if you're anything like me and you have to time track, you end up getting pretty much a week in and you're like, what the hell do I actually did actually do this week? I've completely forgotten what I did. I have no idea. I've got no logs anywhere. But because you're coming out of that 25 minute focus, it, it then becomes very easy to just take a quick five seconds to just note down what you did. So I do find that very useful. And I also think there's a gamification element here, if you're that way inclined that you can give yourself some points every time you complete a pomodoro. I mean, that's a nice idea as well. And I did mention, I think it's kind of bonkers that you're supposed to just do the same task and keep basically doing that task after it's done within the pomodoro. Now I think part of that may be to do with training your brain a little bit, but I also think it's, it's, it's one of those where every one of these systems they get to about 90 to 95% of the way there and then the rest is like, yeah, that doesn't really work. No, that doesn't really make sense. There are some tasks you can't do, you just can't do them anymore. You know what I mean? There's not much else you can do. So for me, I am then switching to the next task, but I'm staying in focused mode. That's the key. I know exactly what I'm going to be doing next and so I immediately switch to that because I know exactly what it is that I'm doing next. I, you know, I'm not then checking my email to see what's come in. I'm not doing anything else distracting. I'm moving immediately to the next thing. If, you know, if it's something like five minutes and I'm just filling up that time, then when it comes to the log, I'll just omit that from the log because there's not much point and then I'll probably be spending the next pomodoro fully on that task, so it all kind of evens up. So those are my thoughts. I do actually find if you have got work that maybe is a little bit of a pain in the bum to do, then the Pomodoro technique is a really useful one and there's a few like I said, sort of gamification elements that you might find in it. So for the day job, I think particularly it is really, really helpful. So let me know what you think. Ello Stedman, everywhere on the Internet like I said. Or you can email hellodo FM with your thoughts and I look forward to having a chat with you again next week.