Last year during NaNoWriMo, my Co-ML came up with an ingenious
method to make our Nanites work their tails off. She started us off sprinting.
Short bursts of writing (10-20 minutes) intermixed with 5-10 minute breaks. It
was a way to show the Nanites who were 'too busy' that they only needed to
devote an hour or two a day, whenever they could get it in. Fifteen minutes
here, ten minutes there. Turns out, of course, that it wasn't an original idea,
but she hadn't heard of it when she came up with it, so it was a totally awesome little brain-baby.
Well, I found something just as good, and it has it's own
website. Today, I bring you the Pomodoro Technique, and a free supporting website, Tomato.es. The basis of Pomodoro is to increase productivity with the
same basic principles that make sprinting work: concentrated periods of work,
interspersed with regular breaks.
You work for twenty-five minutes, then mark off that
twenty-five minute work session and move on to a five minute break. After four
sets of twenty-five, you take a fifteen minute break. And it's that simple. It
sounds a little strange, but it really works. Not only do you write words, but
you condition yourself to write a lot of words in a short amount of time. I
mean, you only have twenty-five minutes to work right now. You can't rely on
more. So you'd better bang out some words. When you then don't use the Pomodoro
Technique, you'll find that you're writing words faster in general, hence
increasing overall productivity.
It's that simple. And the Internet is full of so many ways
to work it. There are even apps you can download to help you, such as Pomodroido, Pomodoro Timer, and the desktop compatible, and very unobtrusive Tomighty. Or
, of course, you can do it the simple and cheap way and just watch the clock,
or use one of the thousand online timers out there. But if you, like me, would
rather cut back on your workload as much as possible, and you have access to
the Internet, you'll be best off with Tomato.es.
Voss
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