Pomodoro Technique: How Effectively Do You Manage Time? How It Changes You? Study Wisely! YouTube Lecture Handouts

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Pomodoro Technique: How Effectively Do you Manage Time? How it Changes You? Study Wisely!

Title: Pomodoro Technique

  • The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.
  • The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro, from the Italian word for ‘tomato’ , after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student.
  • There are six steps in the original technique:
    • Decide on the task to be done.
    • Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes) .
    • Work on the task.
    • End work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.
    • If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3 – 5 minutes) and then return to step 2; otherwise continue to step 6.
    • After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) , reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.
  • After task completion in a pomodoro, any time remaining could be devoted to activities such as:
    • Review and edit the work just completed.
    • Review the activities from a learning point of view: What did I learn? What could I do better or differently?
    • Review the list of upcoming tasks for the next planned Pomodoro time blocks, and start reflecting on or updating those tasks.
  • Some variations include:
    • Work in 90-minute time periods. Rather than a 25-minute focus period, work in 90-minute blocks. This reflects a natural concentration cycle.
    • Work in natural time periods. There may be natural time markers in one՚s life: for example, the period between meetings, or the time until one՚s kids or partner come home, or the time until the dishwasher finishes. Use these to define focus periods.
    • Monitor periods of naturally high productivity, and from this data work out the best productivity system

6 Incremental Goals

  • Find effort in activity
  • Cut down interruptions
  • Estimate Efforts
  • Review for 1st few minutes
  • Set Time table
  • Define Goals

The technique has been widely popularized by dozens of apps and websites providing timers and instructions. Closely related to concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development used in software design, the method has been adopted in pair programming contexts

How It Changes You?

Handle interruptions

  • No more mistakes due to lack of concentration.
  • No more wrong estimates, rework, stress and overtime.

Reduce the length and number of meetings

No more long, exhausting and useless meetings.

Reduce estimation errors

  • learn to simplify and organize tasks
  • No more wrong estimates on complex, undefined and uncertain tasks.

Improve motivation by improving the content of work

  • learn to understand the effort a task will take, reduce the complexity of tasks that need doing, organize your time
  • No more lack of confidence, lack of responsibility and lack of trust between team members.

Transform time from being an enemy to being an ally in order to achieve your goals

  • take regular breaks, learn to observe yourself and your team and improve your work process
  • No more work under pressure.
  • No more tensions between team members.
  • No more fear of being accountable.

Meet deadlines without time pressure

  • learn to transform a complex goal into a series of simpler goals to be reached and hence increase your motivation, the precision of the estimates and the probability of final success
  • No more missed deadlines and costly delays.

Share with your team members the same point of view about what to do

No more doubts about what to do, who has to do what and when something will be done.

Create an effective team timetable to reach multiple goals, handle unplanned events, tasks, emergencies and change

  • No more bottlenecks and interruptions.
  • No more frictions between team members.

Reduce the complexity of your goals and the relative uncertainty of reaching them

  • by learning to transform deeply nested hierarchies of tasks into linear task lists: task lists without dangerous bottlenecks and interdependencies between tasks
  • No more complex, unmanageable and unreachable goals.

Optimise the interaction between team members needed to complete tasks

  • no communication overflows
  • No more thousands of instant messages, emails and calls interrupting your work flow.

Manishika