Pomodoro and other ways to achieve time-based goals

Last week a savvy reader of DNA called me up. “See, I have done almost everything to fit my New Year's resolutions and taking them seriously. But time is limited. How do I manage new stuff and maintain old one too? Any suggestions?” 

We all have 24 hours in a day and need to utilise them well. Now your day begins an hour early as you have started waking up early. You may have done everything that was possible, effectively delegated extra workload, planned the schedule and still might feel that you are juggling too much. You can put these strategies to work to maximise the takeaway of time. All of these work differently for every individual. Keeping that in mind, try one or any with variations of outcomes.

Make a format: Most organisations have a repetitive kind of work pattern. It helps if you have personal templates or format. What I mean by personal is that there are formats of every work at the organisational level. But if you can create a layout for daily routine work such as sending emails, payment reminders or even making work reports, it helps in not only remembering what needs to be done but also finishing it quickly. For example, if your job demands, sending daily different work updates to multiple people, a personal layout of how many done and remaining will help. 

Pomodoro: The Pomodoro Technique is a method by Francesco Cirillo, a famous consultant to the global software industry whose focus areas are efficiency and productivity. Cirillo suggests that we divide all tasks into 30-minute increments with built-in breaks, measured with a timer. When he came up with this idea, he used the timer shaped like a little tomato for demonstration purpose. That's why the name is Pomodoro, which is the Italian word for tomato. If you like rules and formulae but avoid excess language, this may be the approach for you. Timer instils a sense of urgency so one focuses more and distraction management is better. 

Don't be bound with other people's expectations: We often self-generate rules we expect ourselves to follow. For example, “I need to reply to Rajesh more quickly because he generally replies to me.” Guilt is not your friend here. People might want you to respond even before they thought of writing to you. Take a breath. Every action of the other person does not necessarily mean immediate reaction from you. Now limit your responses to working hours. People are more likely to consider that you don't jump at every email or text and slowly tune in to respecting the boundary.

Thin slice: Some people have an interesting habit. Alice Boyce, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Business School named it as “Incomplete Warrior.” They habitually set goals so big that they end up putting them off. So basically everything they start remains incomplete. Boyce says, “What helps here is a technique of “Half Size.” When you consider a goal, also consider a half-size version. Mentally put your original version and the half-size versions side by side and ask yourself which is the better (more realistic) goal. If your task still feels intimidating, shrink it further until it feels doable. You might end up with a goal that's one-fourth or one-tenth the size of what you initially considered but that's more achievable — and once you start, you can always keep going.” Thin slicing helps a lot if the load is overwhelming. 

There are innumerable publications on time management. Yet, every day a few hundred more are added to the list. This means there are more aspects that keep showing up with each person. The anxiety of completion actually engulfs every strategy and throws you in the compulsion of a do or die situation and that too right away. An old adage says that well planned is half done. An easy way to manage completion anxiety is to actually stick to proper planning. 

Remember that with every minute of distractions around us, it is difficult to be a perfect time manager. So do not beat yourself up if there are occasional slips. Look at the big picture of being organised, getting more accomplished in less time and stay on the course with strong will power. 

The writer is strategic advisor and premium educator with Harvard Business Publishing