Have you ever felt that the time is flying by and you got nothing done? I have that problem time to time both at work and at home.
Some days are full of interrupts that force you to context switch a lot. This makes it hard to focus on the things that one is supposed to do that day. So after reading Uncle Bobs book “The Clean Coder” there he mentioned the pomodoro technique I felt that I have to try it.
I found resources telling about it on the net and even found out that it is possible to get certified in it. The major website about it is pomodorotechnique.com.
The basic idea is to divide your work in 25 min dedicated sessions. Every possible interruption is politely handled by asking them if you can get back to them in 25 min. So after the 25 min session, take care of the interrupts that may have happen. Take a short brake of 5 min and start a new pomodoro session.
I tried this technique for some days and it really makes you focus on your tasks. The problem that I have was that I didn’t handle the interrupts in the right way all the time. So some of the sessions did fail because of that. But the result of the sessions that succeeded was really good. I felt at the end of the day, when I managed to do 7 or 8 sessions, that I was really tired and saw that I made good progress with the tasks I’ve worked with.
The things I need to get better on is to handle the interrupts to not interfere with the current session. Otherwise I strongly recommend people that have this problem to try this technique.
