(You don’t have to buy a tomato timer. You can use any timer, or\u00a0one of many<\/a> apps based on the technique – or the free tomato timer<\/a> page.)<\/p>\n The idea is that you block your time into 25-minute segments, with a five-minute break after each one. For every four Pomodoros, you take a longer break, 15 to\u00a030 minutes.<\/p>\n You’re saying, “So what?” But here’s the key: You don’t do ANYTHING ELSE but your focused activity for the whole 25 minutes.<\/p>\n You don’t answer the phone, check your email, glance at Facebook, get a cup of coffee – no. You save those things for the breaks.<\/p>\n Unbroken concentration for 25 minutes accomplishes more than five 5-minute segments interrupted by 3 seconds to 3 minutes of other stuff.<\/p>\n Being an overachiever, I decided to slice my entire\u00a0day into Pomodoros. That’s 48 in a day.<\/p>\n Last night I drew up my schedule for what I would do during each Pomodoro (hence my construction paper art<\/a>) and each break. This is aligned with various habits that I’m working on, such as drinking eight glasses of water, studying new skills, and methodically explore my career options.<\/p>\n Today I got up 10 minutes early and plunged in. I managed to keep up with the schedule pretty well, but by afternoon\u00a0the break seemed waaaaaaay too short.<\/p>\n I started feeling like tomato sauce.<\/p>\n Instead of helping my concentration, the Pomodoro sprints\u00a0left me thinking, “What! Another segment! Wait, what am I supposed to be doing now?”<\/p>\n However, I was<\/em> very productive today. I got a lot more done than I have been lately.<\/p>\n I’ll take another whack at it\u00a0tomorrow. And maybe it will be diced tomatoes then. And by Friday, I hope to feel like a\u00a0whole tomato again.<\/p>\n Day 126 is a 1988 penny, for the approximate year that the Pomodoro technique was invented.<\/p>\n Twenty-five minutes: What can you accomplish? The tomato\u00a0method says: A lot. If you do only ONE thing – and nothing else. Like a lot of people, I struggle to walk\u00a0the fine line between multitasking and being scatter-brained. Email and social media are a constant lure, an easy way to distract us from focusing on the … read more Cutting a tomato into 48 pieces<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[317],"tags":[60,463,459,458,462,461,460],"class_list":["post-6181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beauty","tag-60","tag-concentration","tag-efficiency","tag-productivity","tag-schedule","tag-timer","tag-tomato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6181"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6186,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions\/6186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Day](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Day-126-1988-e1447119903331.jpg\")
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