THINKER'S ALMANAC - November 24

How can the Italian word for tomato make you more focused and productive?

Subject:  Life Hacks - The Pomodoro Technique

Event:  “Letter of Recommendation:  Kitchen Timer” is published, 2015.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, whether you like it or not. - Thomas Huxley

On this day in 2015, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Ben Dolnick entitled, “Letter of Recommendation:  Kitchen Timer.”  In the essay, Dolnick chronicles a strategy he developed to be more productive while working at home.  The key to his strategy was a simple kitchen timer.  Setting the timer for periods of just under one hour at a time, he resolved to sit and remained hyper-focused solely on his work until the timer went off.  

                                                                Image by Jakub Luksch from Pixabay 

Dolnick's strategy worked, and in the following excerpt, he explains his new focused mindset:

To my surprise and delight, this hunk of Chinese-made plastic proved a capable tyrant. To be exactly 43 minutes from my next break — a break that would itself be of a discrete length — was, it turned out, vastly more bearable than having to decide over and over whether a particular impulse was worth following, whether a creative impasse was the kind that you ought to surrender to or the kind that you ought to overcome. To my mind’s perpetual, child-in-the-back-seat questioning (Can we get up yet? Can we get up yet?), I had finally discovered a stern answer: ‘‘Has the timer run down? Then, no, we can’t.’’

As he ends his essay, Dolnick celebrates his new strategy, marveling at how it allowed him to no longer waste time and how it made him so much more focused and productive.  He also recognizes the paradox inherent in his new strategy:

Without my timer, I am apparently inclined to fritter [my time] away with all the prudence of an over-caffeinated squirrel. With it, I am thoroughly constrained — and I am free. (1)

Some know Dolnick’s technique by another name, the Pomodoro Technique.  Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, the strategy gets its name from the Italian word for “tomato,” which happens to be a common shape used for kitchen timers.  Cirillo suggests setting the timer for periods of 20 to 30 minutes of focused work; he calls these focused working periods pomodoros.

Of course any timer will do, but the key to the success of this life hack is to clearly define your focused task prior to setting your timer.  Knowing specifically what your task is will then increase the likelihood that you will remain focused rather than allowing outside distractions to derail your efforts.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the Pomodoro Technique, and how does it relate to a kitchen timer and being more productive?

 

Challenge - Life Hacks: Do a bit of research on other life hacks that might make you a more effective learner or that might help you be more productive. Find one that you think is interesting and potentially useful; then, write an explanation of how it works and how it makes you more effective?

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

November 24, 1703: On this day, the winds of one of the fiercest storms in British history began to blow.  They would continue blowing for an entire week, resulting in 123 deaths on land and 8,000 drowned at sea.  More than 800 houses were destroyed along with over 400 windmills.  Almost as notable as the storm itself was the publication of an account of the storm that was published by Daniel Defoe just a few months after the storm.  At the time, Defoe had not yet published his best-known work, the novel Robinson Crusoe.  Defoe had just been released from prison after serving several months for seditious libel after publishing a satirical tract on the religious intolerance of the Church of English.  His sentence included being put in the pillory in the center of London for one hour on three successive days.  Desperate for money after his legal troubles, Defoe hatched the idea of writing about the great storm.  He didn’t just write his own account, however. Instead, he placed newspaper ads requesting individuals to send him their stories from the storm.  Although there were newspapers at the time, the type of objective news reporting we associate with journalism today was non-existent.  Defoe’s book The Storm is seen today as a pioneering work of journalism, containing approximately 60 separate first-hand accounts of England’s great tempest (2).

Sources:

1-Dolnick, Ben. “Letter of Recommendation:  Kitchen Timer.”  The New York Times 24 Nov. 2015.

2-Miller, John J. “Writing Up a Storm” Wall Street Journal 13 August 2011.