The alert that pulls me back from 1975 glam folk albums

April 14, 2022 Finding Focus Give your mind complete freedom, then bring it back. This gives us control over our focus. How would you define focus? I would define it as directed attention. Something akin to channeling your energy and concentration into a path that leads to a desirable outcome. I have been reflecting a lot on focus recently during my meditation practice. Big shout out to the Adelaide School of Practical Philosophy as well as the app Headspace and their course titled “Finding Focus”.

In my reflection I have been thinking about the tools and strategies that I already use to bring a focus to my worklife. There is a great tool that I use and I wish to share it with others. During my final year at University, a peer told me about a website named Kanbanflow. It is a simple kanban board but it has one extraordinary feature. It has a 25 minute timer that creates blocks of time called Pomodoros. This is named after the tomato kitchen timer. You set up your task on the kanban board, start the timer, and after 25 minutes an alert dings and asks you take a five minute break. After 4 Pomodoros (2 hours) it asks you to take a 15minute break. The idea is to block out all distractions - your phone, social media, colleagues - and focus on the task right in front of you.

When I first started using this method I found it difficult. I thought to myself, what on earth could I possibly achieve in 25 minutes? I have so many things to do, I won’t be able to leave my desk for hours! But after some practice, I soon realised the power of working in blocks of time like this. Often in my work, I find a problem, and decide to investigate this line of enquiry. I’m sure that you have experienced something similar - I call it “falling down the rabbit hole”. It happens all the time when I jump onto wikipedia to find some information about a person, and all of a sudden I’m looking at 1975 glam folk debut albums. Similarly with Youtube; I jump on the site to look at a 2 minute Adobe help video and then I’m watching a man wander through an abandoned mine with a headtorch for hours!

That’s when the alert helps. It pops up, tells me I need a break, so I go and get a drink, come back and ask myself what I was working on. “Oh, well I was working on optimising these images but instead I’ve been fiddling around with this background colour for 20 minutes that is not a priority at all.” So suddenly, my focus is back on the task at hand. That is the power of the timer - to check that you are staying on task and using your time as effectively as possible.

Do you work in blocks of time? I’d be curious what you’ve found - whether it changes how you estimate work, how you bill, or just how you feel at the end of the day.