Joe Granitto

Tomato, Tom-ah-toe, Pomodoro

Friday, January 19th 2024

​

Hi Friends!

For this week I want to talk to you about a new thing I started doing last week. It's called the "Pomodoro Technique" which the word "pomodoro" is Italian for "tomato". See what I did there with the title? Ok, moving on.

​
I'll give you the brief rundown on what this technique is and save you the trouble of looking it up:

Sweet, now that I've given you the Wikipedia snippet I'll move on to talk about my use case with it.

The problem

I have the horrible tendency with being distracted. I will start working on something, get a notification, then lose my train of thought. It's definitely been more of an issue since I started posting to social media daily. One of the biggest recommendations in social media growth is engaging with your community. Often times I'll find myself spending 20-30 minutes replying to messages, comments, etc. But then I'll spend another hour of senseless scrolling, prolonging me getting anything done.

When I would go into the office while I was a hybrid worker I'd have a different scenario where I'd have conversations with my coworkers. Nothing wrong with socializing, I should probably do more of it, it simply came with the same issue. It would take me a long time to get back into the groove of my work. A 30 minute conversation would then lead me to waste another 30 minutes just to get back to work. I felt so unproductive anytime I went into the office, which is COMPLETELY opposite of what some other people would say. Now, I wouldn't actually take a kitchen timer with me to work and say "Sorry, times up, gotta work". I think they would call me crazy.

Because of this I can't afford to lose valuable time to get my daily needs completed at my job. I use my free time after work to work on my content creation but even when I'm working on my content I'm still faced with the same problem. I want to be able to bulk edit so I don't have to edit every single day and I can focus on other work, but my procrastination and terrible time management skills are preventing me from that.

The Solution, hopefully...

I've seen other creators use a timer before on their short form videos and even long form videos. I didn't know what the timer was so I literally googled "pomodoro timer" and got a whole list of kitchen timers. It seems silly because I literally looked up the technique and read that the guy who invented it used a kitchen timer that was shaped like a tomato, hence the name. Sometimes I'm just... dense.

I found one on sale on Amazon and bought it. It wasn't going to show up till the next evening so in the meantime I started using my work phone as my timer and I put my personal phone on Work Mode so I wouldn't get any notifications. I immediately felt like I was better at being productive. It did concern me, though, that this was simply a placebo effect.

How It's Been Going So Far

I tried it for 5 hours the first day and honestly felt like I got so much more done in that 5 hours than I would have without the timer. I had my job responsibilities completed and funny enough right at 5pm so that was my end of day. Then I took the 30 minute break because it was at the end of 4 cycles. When I got back to it for my content I set the timer again. I was able to complete my short form posts for the following day, catch up on emails and messages, start writing the newsletter for Friyay and edit some of my YouTube video for the next week. That took me about 4 hours. When my wife got home from work, I was able to step away from my computer for the rest of the night.

I am enjoying it, actually. It sort of gamifies the work in a way. I set my timer to 25 minutes, work as much as I can and then once it's up I set it to 10 minutes. I do that 4 times then I set a break for 30 minutes. During my breaks I'll unlock my phone, scroll a bit. I'll go get a drink, use the restroom, etc. then come back ready to go again only to find that my timer is still going and I have 8 minutes left lol. I force myself to take the full 10 or 30 minutes because I want to avoid burnout. I have a lot to get done but I don't want to have my personal health suffer.

I am not perfect with it. I have gone over on the working mode and I have gone over on the resting mode. I do love the principle of it and I hope that it helps me retrain my brain into a more seamless, uninterrupted workflow.

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend researching it some more and see if it may benefit you. The worse case scenario is now you have a nice kitchen timer for your cooking!

Feel free to check out the one I linked. It's the one I use and it's around the $20 USD range.

I'll probably write again about this, but for now I'm going to end it here because the timer LITERALLY just went off so now it's time for my 10 minute break.

Have a great weekend!

-Joe