Sorry, I am in the middle of a Pomodoro

Pomodoro is a simple and effective time-management technique (called “pomodoro” because of the italian tomato-shaped kitchen timer). The basic rules are:

• work in timeboxes of twenty-five minutes, every timebox counts as one “pomodoro”
• after each pomodoro take a five-minute break
• after four pomodoros, take a longer break.

During the twenty-five minutes you are supposed to work. Do nothing else. Ignore all interruptions, do not check emails, do not make phone calls or chat. Just work.
These rules should be enough to help raise concentration and effectiveness.

External Interruptions

Not only your own distractions should be banned. Special rules apply also to the external interruptions. Citing the “The Pomodoro Technique” book:

If a colleague comes over, you can politely say you’re busy and can’t be interrupted. (Some people use the humorous expression “I’m in the middle of a Pomodoro.”) Then tell the person that you’d rather call them back in 25 minutes, or in a few hours, or tomorrow, depending on how urgent and important the matter is.

This sounds to be kind of a problem for software development. If someone of my colleagues is willing to discuss a problem, they have no more than a 20% chance to catch me during my pomodoro break – all the other time I am supposed to concentrate on my own work and reject all inquiries. By starting a pomodoro and declaring rules that nobody should disturb me, I effectively build a communication wall, refuse to help, break team agility.

On the other hand, if I stop my work to help someone or to temporally switch to some other problem I certainly lose productivity. But the team wins – and it matters. I am not going to block anyone with my pomodoros. I should probably even hide my pomodoro timer, so that nobody hesitates to contact me just because I still have five minutes till the next break.

If it Hurts, Do it More Often

If the notorious loss of productivity by context switch cannot be avoided, it should at least be reduced. Same as any other activity, the context switch can be trained and there is enough place for improvement. Couple of my colleages could be a perfect example showing that loss of personal productivity could be reduced when doing it often.

Another aspect is the subjective nature of the productivity loss, the feeling of discomfort one gains being interrupted, reluctant unwillingness to put off the current task. Ignore or suppress the discomfort through denial of communication cannot always work. The better solution could be to work with it, analyze, do it more often and even so succeed.

Conclusion

Still, the pomodoro technique is a nice method to keep concentration high. Just the aspect of loosing personal productivity in favour of team productivity should be taken into account.

Related Articles

• Martin Fowler – FrequencyReducesDifficulty
• Greg Young – Multi-Tasking

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