Now that most of us are working from home, we’re facing a whole slew of new challenges. How do I stay focused with my kids around? What are effective boundaries when I never technically “leave” my office? Do I need to wear pants to my Zoom meeting?
In all seriousness, working from home can make it even more difficult to start tasks that we’re dreading. There are just so many more appealing things to get sidetracked by—it can be hard to begin, even when we know a task or project is important.
One of my clients is a freelance editor, who worked from home even before the coronavirus pandemic began. Some days, tasks would come in from various clients at a seemingly unrelenting rate. It felt like every deadline was falling on the exact same date and time.
To get through it, she’d try to bulldoze through her task list, attempting to get everything done in one chunk. Because she was working from home, there weren’t any parameters telling her when to start—or when to stop.
The result, of course, was that by the end of it (and sometimes before the end) her brain would be completely fried, and she needed her mind sharp so she could catch all of the little editorial de-tails.
But here’s the kicker: because she was staring down 9 or 10 hours of work, she tended to put off starting on the task list in the first place. She would find reasons to get distracted, doing just about anything until she couldn’t avoid her work anymore.
Not only was she burnt out by the end, but she was also starting at the last possible moment, put-ting tons of stress and pressure on herself to get it exactly right while also moving quickly.
It was a recipe for disaster.
What gives?
This predicament might feel familiar, especially as working from home makes it difficult to set clear boundaries on how we spend our time.
As a result, sometimes it just feels too hard to make progress on a critical project.
Maybe the project is large and you don’t know where to start. Maybe you know it needs to be done, but you just don’t feel like doing it. Maybe it’s just hard to buckle down and do the thing.
It’s as though every time you sit down to work on a particular item, the perfect recipe for distraction comes along and it feels impossible to make a real dent.
Try this instead:
What ended up working for my client is something you’ve probably heard of before: the Pomodoro Technique.
This technique was invented by Francesco Cirillo and is named for the tomato-shaped timer found in every Italian kitchen (“pomodoro” means “tomato” in Italian). Go here to learn more.
Here’s how it works:
Set a timer for 25 minutes (yes, there’s an app for that) and focus on your specific task for those 25 minutes. Turn off all distractions and focus.
When you get to the end of the 25 minutes, take a five-minute break. This is one “pomodoro.”
The complete Pomodoro Technique includes putting four pomodoros (pomodori?) back-to-back and then taking a longer break (15-20 minutes), but my client found that she enjoyed the momentum from the bursts of work and began not worrying about how many she was doing in a row.
This helped her in two key ways:
1. Because she wasn’t trying to tackle a whole day of work all at once, starting the process with just 25 minutes felt a lot less overwhelming.
2. Because she was working in shorter bursts, she felt a lot less burnt out by the end of it, which meant she was able to work at nearly the same efficiency toward the end as she did at the beginning.
The most surprising part of this was how, because of this renewed energy and efficiency, she was spending less time on the task than she was before!
A lot of people roll their eyes at the pomodoro as a too-often recommended strategy. But for some people and some tasks, it can work wonders.
Here’s a bonus tip:
There are multiple ways to use this technique.
Yes, you can use it like this editor did, to help you stay focused without burning out by setting clear start and end times for work. But you can also use it to kickstart a much larger task.
Sometimes telling ourselves that “we just have to do 25 minutes” is enough to get the ball rolling. In a way, we can use this to “trick” ourselves into starting an otherwise overwhelming or tedious task.
For me, just doing one or two “pomodori” is often sufficient to break the logjam and get my work going.
I encourage you to give this technique a try as you adjust to working from home, and see what approach works best for you. You might be surprised both at how much you have accomplished—and how fast the time went.
Have you used this technique before? Or do you do something else? Comment below.
(And no, you still don’t have to wear pants on your Zoom call.)
