I'm in the office with my team today. On the list are a couple of projects that have been sitting on the back burner for weeks, some of them for months.
By the end of the day they're done. All of them.
They weren't hard. We'd just never given them our full attention.
Weapons of mass distraction
The problem is rarely the time a job takes. It's finding the time to focus on it.
There's more fighting for our attention than ever. Texts, emails, calls, social media and a whole row of messaging apps. If you're not careful, your phone becomes a weapon of mass distraction.
The tomato timer
The trick I use is called the Pomodoro technique. It's named after those kitchen timers shaped like a tomato, and it couldn't be simpler.
Set a timer for 25 minutes. For those 25 minutes, work on one thing and ignore everything else. I put my laptop on do not disturb and my phone in flight mode, because if I see it light up, I'll look.
When the timer goes, take five minutes. Make a cup of tea, check your email, look at whatever you've been itching to look at. Then set the timer again.
Keep going until the job's done. And don't aim for perfect while you're at it. Done beats perfect, every single time.
Still ticking
I still use a timer for anything that needs proper thinking. Twenty-five minutes, phone out of reach. It's the same trick I use to protect time for myself, which I wrote about in Put yourself in the diary.
The distractions have only got louder since 2017. Apps are better than ever at grabbing us. That makes a cheap kitchen timer more useful now, not less.
Every time I ignore a ping for 25 minutes, it's a tiny version of the power of no. No to the noise, yes to the thing that matters.
Pick the job you've been putting off longest. Put your phone in another room, set a timer for 25 minutes, and see how far you get before it goes off.
First published August 2017.
