If you have time in this business (tech), at least 1 time you must have read or heard, wanting or not, about Pomodoro Technique for making easier your way to become a more productive worker. If not, let me congratulate you, because maybe you have the key to efficiency, therefore you don't have to deal with yourself to create.
Remembering what Pomodoro Technique consists of, I'm quoting Wikipedia:
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.
I don't want to be so deep on the basics. I'll just paste an image here and, if you want the complete information, you can go to the source.
source: dev.to
In this post, I want to talk about how I improved the Pomodoro Technique to make it effective for me. So we'll be following a list of points that aren't necessarily ordered. And the first of them is:
Get rid of distractions FOR REAL.
This would be a little difficult if you have home-office work: your phone is your environment so you have to be aware of it. But take notice of, as much as you can, if you turn off notifications and set a specific timelapse for working ONLY on that task which is making you disquiet, you will notice considerable progress on your work.
Pro-Tip: You could install a Browser Blocker extension so you can't go to social media even if your instinct makes you go through it. I use this blocker, which is a beautiful Hispanic joke, but you can use whatever you want.
Experiment with the duration of chunks
There are plenty of settings for the Pomodoro technique: 25 minutes of work, 5 for short breaks and 15 for long breaks; 50-10-25, etc. You could try some of them until you find which setting works better for you, whatever you need as long as you don't get stuck on 25+5+15 if it doesn't work for you.
Look into yourself: How much time you can work without losing your focus? How much time do you need to feel comfortable with your work? Do you need more or less rest time? This is the kind of thing that you can only improve with trial and error. My personal choice is 40+10+20.
Silence and noises are your friends
I have discovered recently that I can get focused on a task much easily if I have some soft noise in the background, like rainymood.com. Else you can try white noises or some lo-fi music.
Recommended tools for working with Pomodoro
focuswithdot.com/lofi is a website where you can set the timer that you like, and also you can choose the ambient sound that you like. It has rivers flowing to library ambient sounds, also it has lo-fi music and meditation.
Merve is a youtube channel that specializes in studying with you in her live streams. She uses 50+10 format which is my personal favorite for studying.
As Merve, you can try other youtube videos with the Pomodoro that you want to do
These tips worked for me, a very easy to distract person, and I wanted to share with the community just in case someone finds it useful.
Tell me in the comments if you have another tips! What worked for you?