Consider the Pomodoro Technique for Increased Focus and Creativity

If you have trouble allowing little distractions to pull you away from your work several times a day, the Pomodoro Technique might be a great fit for you. This is a great time management method.

This technique is also great for those who have work that could take an unlimited amount of time like if you were writing a book. The Pomodoro Technique has four basic steps.

The first step is to simply pick a task from your to-do list. The second step is to set a timer for twenty-five minutes and you would only work on that task for the allotted amount of time.

This means you wouldn’t pause to check social media or have any distractions open in the background. It also means that you wouldn’t switch to a task that you find easier or feel more urgent.

Once your twenty-five minutes are up, the next step in the method is to take a five-minute break. After the break, you would then choose a new task, or return to your first task if it wasn’t complete and work for another twenty-five minutes.

Each task is referred to as your pomodoro. Once you’ve done four pomodoros, or after four of your twenty-fine minute sessions, the final step is to take a break that is at least fifteen minutes long.

This final break shouldn’t exceed thirty minutes. This technique has become so popular because it helps you break down complex projects into ones with manageable amounts of time.

It can be hard to doing research for five hours, but it becomes easier when you do it in twenty-five-minute sprints. You can also put more than one pomodoro in a session. So for example, if you have some simpler tasks like folding laundry or paying the doctor bill you can put them together in one session.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can cross things off your to-do list when you use this technique. If you’re in the middle of a pomodoro and you remember you need to do something else, don’t stop.

Simply write the forgotten task down and continue working. For this technique to work, it’s important that you don’t stop during the middle of one. Some interruptions—such as needing to pick kids up—are unavoidable.

If this happens during one of your pomodoros, simply take that time as your break, and start a new pomodoro after the interruption is over. You may find it useful to plan your pomodoros in advance to head off interruptions.

Divide your blocks of time into sections and write next to these sections what you’re going to accomplish during your pomodoro. You can also write down how many pomodoros you think it will take you, or how many you would like it to take you and then strive to reach that goal.

It’s important when planning your pomodoros not to assign yourself so much that you can’t cross everything off the list. This will leave you feeling like you failed or that it didn’t work at the end of the day. Start with the more pressing and urgent tasks, and if you have more time, then work on the smaller things.

A Proven Way to Boost Your Creativity and Focus

You might be a creative who wants to find more ways to up your productivity and your focus. But if you’re like most creatives, focus might not be your strength. You’re not alone in thinking that way.

Most creatives don’t think in concrete, specific terms when it comes to business things. That’s because the business side feels removed from the creative side. So what you need to do is tap into the creative side to boost the business side.

There is a proven way that you can boost your creativity to get more accomplished and be able to reach your goals. You have to get specific with your thoughts. Sort of having an idea of what you want, or need isn’t going to work.

It’s only when something is specific that you can identify it and work on accomplishing it.

Once you’ve narrowed down what it is you’re after, add a time constraint. For example, if money is what you need, you wouldn’t spend time saying, “Think about where or how I can get more money.”

Instead, you’d say, “What are 5 business models I can put into effect within 10 minutes?” This helps you to develop concrete ways to help take your creativity to the next level.

By having a specific goal with your thoughts, you’ll come up with ideas to improve whatever it is that you need. This step of coming up with ideas within a certain time limit keeps you from wasting time, but it also works for creatives because they don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking of the business side, which can drain creativity.

The ideas that you come up with by adding time constraints can also be put into play faster than if you were vague and spent hours or days trying to come up with a solution.

With your business, you’ll need to learn the best way to market it.

You might have gone back and forth trying to come up with ways that you could do this, but you weren’t able to pin anything down. Rather than spending a lot of effort thinking about this step, you could say that you were going to make a list of the pros and cons of a certain kind of advertising within 15 minutes.

By giving yourself that time limit, you turn into a game and this can produce quicker results and give you ideas for solutions. Plus, when you’re specific about what you want and you introduce that time limit, it boosts your creativity because your focus is intentional rather than running in different directions. It does this because it’s easier for the mind to focus for shorter periods of time versus thinking that you have several hours or days to come up with something.