People who work in social environments can be interrupted: your study partner asks you to explain a paragraph or suggests going to a movie after dinner; a phone call doesn’t get effectively filtered by the secretary; a colleague asks you how to compile a report; an email program constantly beeps every time a new message comes in. What should you do?
Objective II:
Cut Down on Interruptions
The length of a Pomodoro, 25 minutes, seems short enough to make it possible to resist being distracted by various kinds of interruptions. But experience shows that once you’ve started using the Pomodoro Technique, interruptions can become a real problem. That’s why an effective strategy is needed for minimizing interruptions and progressively increasing the number of Pomodoros that can be accomplished consistently without interruptions. There are two kinds of interruptions: internal and external.
The Pomodoro Technique 3.
Objective I:
Find Out How Much Effort an Activity Requires
The traditional Pomodoro is 30 minutes long: 25 minutes of work plus a five-minute break. At the beginning of each day, choose the tasks you want to tackle from the Activity Inventory Sheet, prioritize them, and write them down in the To Do Today Sheet.
Material and Method
The Context
Who hasn’t experienced anxiety when faced with a task that has to be finished by a certain deadline? In these circumstances, who hasn’t felt the need to put off that task or fallen behind schedule or procrastinated? Who hasn’t had that unpleasant sensation of depending on time, chasing after appointments, giving up what one loves to do for lack of time?
