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Breaking Through Learning Obstacles: Boost Productivity with the Pomodoro Technique, with Barbara Oakley, Professor of Engineering. Oakland University, and Author, Mindshift
The pomodoro technique is probably one of the most powerful techniques in all of learning. So I teach a course called Learning How to Learn that’s actually the world’s largest massive open online course. We have something like two million people. And the pomodoro technique is the most popular technique I hear from literally thousands of people. And I have to give credit to the creator who was Francesco Cirillo. He developed this technique in the early 1980s. And it’s so simple that really anybody can do it.
Manage your time
All you have to do is turn off all distractions. So no little ringy-dingies on your cell phone or anything like that. On your computer you want to turn off any kind of messages that might arise, set a timer for 25 minutes and then just focus as intently as you can for those 25 minutes. If you’re like me sometimes you’ll have this sort of feeling like you’ll look up and suddenly realize that you’ve gone two minutes into your pomodoro. And my mind goes oh, I can’t do another 23 minutes. And you let that thought just go right on by and you return your attention. And you can finish off those 25 minutes because really anybody can do 25 minutes. And this is a key thing. When you’re done you reward yourself. And you reward yourself by relaxing a little bit and doing something completely different. When you get your attention off of something there’s this neural processing that begins in the background. And that actually consolidates and helps build your understanding.
Manage the pain
There’s an interesting tidbit related to the pomodoro technique and that is that when you even just think about something that you don’t like very much it activates a portion of the brain that experiences pain. And so the brain naturally enough shifts its attention to something else, anything else like Facebook or Twitter or something like that. And what you’ve just done is you’ve procrastinated. And what the pomodoro technique does when you do it you’re setting that timer you don’t want to sit there and think I am going to finish this homework set or I’m going to work on this problem and get it all finished. You just want to think I’ve got 25 minutes were I just have to work on something. Don’t even think about what that something is. What that does is it slips in under your brain’s radar. It doesn’t activate so much that pain in your brain and then that pain in the brain research has shown it lasts for 20 minutes. So if you work for 25 minutes you will suddenly find yourself getting into the flow because you’ve gone past that painful period. So the pomodoro technique is effective in many different some very subtle ways and so I highly recommend it.