In this episode, I answer a questions about the Pomodoro Technique.
Full transcript:
John:Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com. I got this question from Kent about the Pomodoro Technique. As you might know I am a big proponent of. I follow that technique. I have kind of my own version of this withāusing the KanbanFlow but I often get some questions about how I execute this. Kent says, āI recently finished reading your book on soft skills and wanted to start by congratulating you on such a fine piece of work.ā Hereās the book if youāre interested. āIt was thoroughly fantastic and Iām already applying some of the techniques you suggest with good success so far. If you have time I have a few questions for you about the Pomodoro Technique.ā Thereās a couple of questions here.
āHow do you account or adjust for delays imposed by computers? Iām talking about software updates sometimes forced on you, long build times, mobile dev particularly has lengthy build lengths, backups. Since starting the Pomodoro Technique I found myself several times in a position where Iām being forced to wait a long time for a computer and I wasnāt sure how to deal with that. Iād switch task if I could but often my entire machine is crippled until the update is completed.ā
Iāll just address these one at a time. When you have things that are outside of your control when youāre doing the Pomodoro Technique and this is a refresher here, the Pomodoro Techique youāre basically working for 25 minutes on a single focus task, no interruptions then you take a 5 minute break. In that 25 minute block Kent is basically asking, āHey, what happens when you got to wait for your computer update or something that is stopping you from working, what do you do?ā
Thereās a couple of different things that you could do. One, you can switch to another task. I frequently do this. Technically thatās against the rules. But hey, what are youāare you just going to sit there at your computer? Iāll switch to another task and start working on that task. Youāve got to be careful. You donāt want to be switching, switching, switching task but itās acceptable in my mind to switch to one task. Weāre going to be pragmatic.
The other possible thing is staying on the same task. This is probably preferable but get out your pad of paper or go to your whiteboard and start doing some brainstorming. Most tasks require some thinking as well as some doing. Very rarely is there a task where theyāre just like do, do, do, do, so plan it out a little bit more while youāve got that down time while youāre waiting for something to happen. Do some of the thinking work and usually you can figure that out if youāif you think in those terms you can usually figure out how you can do that. Overall, number one, be pragmatic about it. Just donāt sit there and wait in front of the computer because youāre supposed to follow these rules of the Pomodoro Technique. Thatās not very pragmatic.
Then he asked, āWhat about problems with third party software? Iāve been hit by several bugs and third party dependencies including my dev tools themselves. I had to go on major tangents to get those issues fixed and felt like I was straying from my goals even though I guess I wasnāt. They would just take me longer.ā
Again, you can apply this generally. When youāre sitting there doing the Pomodoro things that are outside of your control are going to happen, right? Youāre going to go on some tangent. The idea is to minimize this as much as possible, right? When you recognize something that is going to be a new task thatās going to take you a longer amount of time, then plan that out. You might not have to do it immediately.
For example, suppose that youāre working on your task, your Pomodoro, and then all of a sudden you have some kind of a bug on a third party component and youāve got to go and fix that thing in order to finish your task. At that point you want to figure out first of all whatās the minimal thing that you need to do to get your task done? Can you do some kind of work around or something in order to accomplish what youāre trying to accomplish? If you canāt and when you do that you might be able to create a new task that youāre going to work on to fix that thing later, to fix the right way later so that it doesnāt interrupt that flow. If you canāt then youāll just have to accept reality, again being pragmatic and realize that youāre going to have to go down this road and things are going to take you longer than you expected, but thatās where you replan.
If you planned out your day you get new information and you realize that I have 2 hours, this critical task or 2 hours worth of debugging that Iām going to have to do, you have to replan your day. You have to sit there and match reality. You canāt force things thatāyou canāt artificially force things. Replanning your day is probably going to be the answer in most of those cases.
Then he says here, āWhat about random little things that require waiting on a third party?ā Again, the same thing here, Iām not going to go into the details here. He does mention though that if you had something thatās going to take a week later how do you handle this. I schedule in my calendar and I move on, call that task complete. You can only set work for you that youāre actually going to be able to accomplish so donāt try and control the world, you can only control you.
In those times when you know that youāre going to wait on someone, mark your responsibility of what youāre supposed to do. Thatās your task. Your task shouldnāt be the entire thing that needs to be accomplished, but the thing that you need to do. Thatās the key component and then you can mark something in your calendar to follow up or you can various programs that will auto-follow up for you.
Another question, āWhy does the Pomodoro timer on KanbanFlow anyway not have a pause? Am I missing something? What about when you need the bathroom?ā
Okay. Itās 25 minutes and 5 minutes, right? Youāre an adult. You can hold yourāyou should be able to plan out 25 minutes and 5-minute break. Youāre not supposed to pause the thing, right? It doesnāt have a timer because youāre not supposed to have interruptions. Youāre not supposed to let interruptions happen. If you have aāI mean obviously, if you have emergency, you got to go to the bathroom. Forget about the timer, right? Hopefully, I would hope that you can like plan your day, so that you can not go to the bathroom for 25 minutes and then in the 5-minute break go to the bathroom. Okay. Enough said about that.
āHow much detail do you put in to your Kanban board? It seems too transient and medium to bother putting too much effort in the subtasks and the like. I also feel like Iām duplicating whatās in my issue management software or Evernote.ā This was a good one here. Put in as much detail as you need to clearly define what must be done. When you have something on your task board, itās better to spend a little bit of extra time planning things out to know when something is done rather than to waste time like not knowing when youāre not done or when you need to stop. Spend as much time in detail as you need.
Remember that all this time is overhead and itās wasted time technically. It doesnāt add anything to the bottom line, right? Planning in general is overhead. Itās a waste. Planning doesnāt actually produce a thing, but what planning does is it can save you time. Plan as much as you can save time off in the backend if that makes sense, right? Sometimes 5 minutes of planning can save you an hour worth of work. In that case, you want to pay that overhead, right? If you plan too low level of the detail, sometimes you can spend an hour or you can have 10 people in a meeting that donāt need to be there planning a thing and then they save like 10 minutes of time for all that planning. Thatās not worth it. You got to balance it out.
Again, a lot of my answers to this is pragmatism. Be pragmatic. Think about what makes the most sense and execute on that. Donāt blindly follow rules. Set up rules for yourself, but be pragmatic when you need to break those rules or change those rules.
Hopefully, that helps you. I get a lot of questions about this. Again, most of my time Pomodoro Technique or my productivity system technique questions, most of the answers, will basically be pragmatic and donāt drink a 64-ounce Dr. Pepper because you will have to pee in less than 25 minutes.
Anyway, I hope you found that useful if youāre applying the technique. If you want to find out more about it, you can, of course, pick up your copy of Soft Skills and I do cover a whole section on productivity in there. Thanks for watching and donāt forget to subscribe. Talk to you next time.
| Reference: | Some Questions About The Pomodoro Technique from our NCG partner John Sonmez at the Making the Complex Simple blog. |
