Perhaps it has happened to you that with the outbreak of the pandemic, work presence has been reduced to a minimum or directly replaced by the home office and remote work modality. For companies, making the transition from the office to the home office meant an adaptation challenge that to date continues to generate mixed opinions.
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For many people, having a personal workspace at home instead of being at the company was an advantage that translated into increased productivity. But the truth is that for these ideal conditions to occur, workers had to live in a conducive environment that favors concentration, free from distractions and indefinite postponement of tasks.
On the other hand, most of the people who were forced to work from home have a family and a personal life, apart from the typical work routine. They found more difficulties than benefits when working from home because they discovered that time did not yield them as they expected when they were divided between taking care of the home and their work commitment.
So, how to optimize time without overworking? Believe it or not, there is a method that can help you combine intense workspaces with small rest intervals: the Pomodoro technique.
The Pomodoro technique is a method to improve the management of the time dedicated to an activity. It was created by the Italian Francisco Cirillo, at the end of the 1980s. It is based on the use of a timer to divide time into fixed intervals, called pomodoros, of 25 minutes of activity, followed by 5 minutes of rest, with guidelines longest every four pomodoros.
Its name derives from the tomato shape of the classic kitchen clock that the creator of this technique used when he was a university student. Hence it is called “Pomodoro” because this term means tomato in Italian.
The method is based on the idea that regular breaks can improve mental agility and motivate you to offer an efficient response to time, instead of the state of anxiety that the temporal evolution without breaks usually provokes. In addition, avoiding multitasking, it helps you achieve a broader state of focus, which precisely allows the use of regular pauses.
At the same time, the Pomodoro technique has inspired a large number of software applications, clocks, and stopwatches for practically all current applications that support productivity tools.
Now that you have learned the main characteristics of the Pomodoro technique and its ultimate goal, we are going to tell you how you can improve the efficiency of your home office work using this technique.
First of all, decide which task you are going to start with. You can prioritize the activities and tasks that require the most urgency to start segmenting. Once you have the initially assigned activity of your home office workday, have at your disposal all the elements you need to carry out your work (computer turned on and with enough battery, open applications, notepad, pens, etc.).
Now the second step is to schedule the 25 minutes that your first pomodoro of intense work will last. You can do it on your phone with the alarm app, using the stopwatch, you can even use a ticking kitchen clock. You choose the device that suits your needs and gives you greater security and comfort to work.
The decisive moment has arrived, and here you have to make the most of the time of 25 minutes to advance your activity. It does not mean that you should finish it in this period, but rather advance enough so that it is not wasted time. It can help you to set yourself a goal per pomodoro, achievable during that segment of time.
For example, if you have to write articles for your blog, measure your actual writing performance in about half an hour. How many words can you write in 25 minutes? Can you beat your record by implementing the pomodoro technique? In any case, the idea is that as time goes by you manage to optimize your performance, since this is training for continuous improvement.
You have worked intensely for 25 minutes, what was your result? Did you manage to optimize your performance in that period under pressure? Do not think about these issues now, you will evaluate them later when your workday ends. Instead, take advantage of the 5-minute break between pomodoros to relax your muscles, have a coffee, walk to the patio, answer non-work messages.
The slogan to achieve in these 5 minutes of rest is to rest, although it seems obvious. Emptying your mind of the worries that were on top of you will help you return to activity with greater energy and skill.
The most difficult thing is always to start, because when you do something for the first time you have several doubts and you fear not meeting the objective, which is normal, you may even not reach the set objective at the moment. To avoid frustration, do not set yourself such ambitious goals, but only those that you know that with a little effort you can achieve them without difficulties.
As your performance improves and your natural abilities are enhanced, you can set more rigorous plans for yourself. Remember that all learning requires hard training, but the results will always be more favorable than at the beginning, and the good thing is that you can continue to improve over time.
The limit is only set by you, you just have to start and not stop until you discover a new concern to work on it and make it tangible.
Even business leaders felt they were wasting a lot of time working from home before implementing the Pomodoro technique because the human mind is better focused when working for short periods than when spending long hours in a row without breaks.
In summary, if you are tired of having endless days at home office, plus the obligations of your home, apply the Pomodoro technique with discipline using your office hours, or the one you have available to dedicate all your attention to and see how your performance improves and that of your collaborators in a short time.