How to focus on getting the work done, efficiently!

The technique we will be going through today is known as The Pomodoro Technique, which is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The method uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each period is identified as a Pomodoro, from the Italian for, yes it is food, ‘tomato’, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student. that looks something like this:

The Pomodoro Timer [Source: Wikipedia]

Let’s see that inaction of how I tried this technique to complete documentation of the application. Though the documentation was extensive and it could not be completed in a single sprint, so what I did was I divided it in around 5 sprints. And I took a short break of 5 minutes after each sprint of 25 minutes. Also, I wrote down what distracted me during the documentation process in each sprint and tried to reduce that in the next sprint.

Sprint 1

Here is what distracted me in the 1st Sprint:

• Whatsapp Notifications
• Television Noise
• Snapchat Notificaions
• Kids in the alley

Here is what I did to overcome these distractions before the second sprint

• Snoozed my phone
• Changed the room

Sprint 2

The following events distracted me this sprint:

• Uncomfortable place (because I changed the location)

Here is what I did to overcome this:

• I changed my posture and position to get comfortable with where I was sitting now.

Sprint 3 & Sprint 4

Because I overcome the distraction I had in the last two sprints these sprints I had no distractions whatsoever

Sprint 5

In this sprint I was distracted because I was looking for solution of one small problem in youtube and the top videos youtube caught my attention and the next moment I caught my self watching it, to overcome this I now started using the YouTube searchbar right from the browser’s URL search bar, and it’s easy to use as well. here is how to do that:

first write the URL of any website that has in site search, such as: https://youtube.com/ shown in the image below

type in the URL of the website you want to search in

Now press Tab button, the URL bar of your browser will now look like this instead of your default bar

you now can search the youtube directly, instead of first launching youtube and then searching

It can not only remove distraction but can also reduce time that it takes for youtube to load, then you write your query and then hit search!

Hopefully this article will help improve the productivity of your day to day task, small or big, just concentrate!