If you are like me, and have to accomplish a lot of different tasks and pursue a variety of goals during the day, you need to focus and dedicate your time deliberately to each task to get them done and make a progress.
This deliberation, dedication and allocation of your valuable daily time to different tasks is so important that without it either you don’t make any progress or your progress would be slow and inefficient.
I usually have strategic goals and plans to accomplish and they often require dedication and a significant amount of time to make that progress. If you are not willing to put the quality time that is required to progress, then don’t expect to see the results any time soon. You would most likely progress very slowly by just showing up whenever you had the feeling to do so and won’t see the results as much as you would like to.
I have had this blog since 2021 and very little progress I made towards writing on it till recently and that was all because I didn’t put enough hours into the writing. It requires a deliberate daily or weekly dedication of writing and creating the drafts and then edit them and post them online. And I know why I didn’t make any progress, because I didn’t put the required time in and thus nothing was there for me to show my work for it.
Now that I know I need to spend more time on working focused and non distracted, I use the pomodoro techinque to focus on every task, one at the time.
This is very important to do the tasks one at the time. Because no one has the unlimited attention to do all the things together. Not even that the unlimited attention does not exist, but most likely as psychologists have discovered our brains performs poorly during multi takings, and performs very deep and profound during deep focus and minimal distraction.
Our brains has evolved to be very responsive to distractions and get easily distracted from anything in the environment and with all the notifications, social media and marketing that surrounds us to catch our attention we are more than ever vulnerable towards distractions and harder would be to focus on important tasks.
The good news it that the same that your mind get’s conditioned by Social Media to distractions and shallow work, you can try to make habits of deep work only on one single task at the time.
The Pomodoro technique is very simple, yet powerful enough to help you get the work done. You have to decide and dedicate a chuck of time (I use 1 hour, it is challenging to be focus all of that time, but it really helps me to see the progress) for doing one single task and nothing else, until the timer alarms you that you have finished the required focusing time and done the work.
Once your brain get use to it then the rest is all about goes smoothly and in the long run you would be surprised by the results and how much powerful your focus is.
This is exactly the opposite of the habit and lifestyle of what Social Media marketers try to create. Shallow engagement with as many as possible advertisements, products and contents and becoming a cheery picker while you can be focused on few deep and meaningful things.
Whether you pick one hour, half an hour or even less is up to you and how you like to allocate your time. But I highly recommend that don’t make it less than 25 minutes and don’t stay longer than an hour focused and engaged with a task. The danger of short time frame of focus -such as 20 or 25 minutes- is that your brain doesn’t get as much as it is needed engaged with the task and the potential problem with staying focused more than an hour is that after a deep session of thinking and deep work, your brain is tired and the rest would be more wasting time and the same shallow engagement of your mind to the work.
The optimal time is one hour, as most of the studies show and what I also have found very useful.
During the time I was writing this text I have been using the same technique to keep writing and focused so I can transfer as much as the ideas I can to my computer and if I found some extra time, I can spend it on editing, organizing and eventually posting the final version on my blog.
Also this can be helpful to make sure you don’t jump between tasks as it is one of the most inefficient ways of working. It is basically wasting your valuable time, the time that your brain can be deeply focused on one single task, it gets scattered and randomly allocated in different tasks.
Let’s say you start writing this text, five minutes later, you remember that you have to study French as well, then you abandon writing and begin reading your French textbook, after five minutes, your brain get’s bored and you begin doing something else, like for example reading your accounting textbook or editing that photo you wanted to edit and post it on Social Media. Then you find yourself spending time on the instagram and after a couple of hours, you are now more distracted, tired and nothing meaningful has accomplished before your day is over. And this happens the next day again and again and again.
In the long run you find yourself stuck at the same place doing the same thing without any progress.
The alternative is using pomodoro, finish each task at once, stay focused for an hour (Instead of 5, 10 or 15 minutes) to make a meaningful progress and repeat that again.
And keep everything else that comes to your mind during that work time waiting for their turn and later when you had a time dedicate their respected time to get them done as well.
For example, right now as I think I have to study French, watch some Photoshop tutorials, read for my CSC exam, read for the CAIB 2 exam, Organize and clean my room. Each of these can’t get easily done if I don’t give them the necessary quality attention and dedication. Yes I won’t be able to finish the whole CSC textbook in one hour but it is all of these focused hours that accumulates and finally get’s the work done and out of the way.
Now that I wrote all of these, I still have 10 minutes left from that hour and would spend that time as well editing and organizing my writing to be ready for publication. The goal is to stay and sleep on one task only during that initial time and have the discipline of not getting distracted by anything else. No reading, no playing with my phone, watching YouTube, only and only to get busy writing and keep busy writing until the timer rings.
It is all about teaching your brain and subconscious to work in this method and frame and not form the habit of abandoning the work whenever it feels difficult, uncomfortable or boring.
The same idea as a day job. When you have to be focused for long hours such as 8 or 10 and stay in the office or workplace to get the things done. Would you give it up as soon as you feel tired? You are surely allowed to take short breaks as needed but you won’t be able to hold that job if you go break quickly after just a few minutes every time that you get tired.
As much as it is important to stay focused on the task during the pomodoro time, it is also important to abandon the work after you finish your pomodoro and allow your brain to disengage with activity and take some rest and then get ready with another activities that require the same amount of dedication and attention.
I hope that you find this technique useful and try it as much as you can in your workflow and I can assure you if you use it frequently, it will revolutionize your workflow and makes you way more productive.