The organizational tool you didn’t know you needed: The Pomodoro Technique

During these complicated times, the majority of us are facing (maybe for the first time!) the experience of working and/or studying from home. While for some of us this could be still exciting news and an amazing opportunity to work in our pijamas, for others it could represent huge anxiety and stress. In fact, home schooling, distance learning, home working or whatever you prefer to call it, requires great self-discipline and self-control. And not everyone is good at it (myself included).

During my studies, already when I was in highschool, I soon realized that for the rest of my life I would’ve had to fight against a scary enemy: procrastination. I’ll be honest with you, I’m the greatest procrastinator I know. It doesn’t matter how passioned and motivated I am, there’s always a little something that prevents me from starting. On top of that, my focus doesn’t last long and it takes nothing to distract me. You can now easily imagine how many empty to-do lists I collected over the years and how much time I waisted looking out of the window or by scrolling Instagram. I plead guilty, your Honor.

However, I’m not just a procrastinator, I’m a stubborn procrastinator. This means that the productive and motivated side of me has been fighting with the other lazy side of me. The silver lining of this, is that I tried a crazy amount of tools, apps, techinques anf strategies to keep myself productive and efficient. And now I’m here to tell you all about it.

Disclaimer: all our brains don’t work in the exact same way, therefore what worked for me may be a disaster for you. The only thing you can do is to give it a try!

I reflected long about which organizational tool I wanted to talk about first, and finally I decided to start with my favourite one, so that everyone who doesn’t know it yet or struggles with procrastination and time management could try it as soon as possible.

Ladies and gents, may I present you The Pomodoro Techinque!

The Pomodoro Technique is a tool developed by Francesco Cirillo around 1980 (read more about him and his company here) and aims to help you manage your time to work better and more efficiently. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and I must admit that it’s really simple, intuitive and especially effective! You’ll only need the timer on your phone (but you can also download an app on your App/Play Store by searching “Pomodoro Timer”/”Tomato Timer”) and a little motivation.

If you want to discover how the Pomodoro Techinque works, here below you can find a short video I created that explains how you should proceed and why you should give it a try:

https://vimeo.com/400919950

So, what do you think about it? Did you already know this time management tool? If not, would you try it? If someone actually tries it, let me know in the comments what your impressions are!

Photo by Leilani Angel on Unsplash