My pomodoro experience

I have been using on and off the pomodoro technique since earlier this year. It works great when pair programming but I have also used it alone.

In a nutshell, this our loop:

10 Agree on the goal for the next 25 minutes
20 Start the timer
30 Work towards the goal until the time is up.
40 Take a 5 minutes break
50 GOTO 10

After 3 loops, we take a longer break.

We use it for story work, prototyping, designing, team presentations, email, etc…

It seems easier to use pomodoros when working with a pair. Agreeing on the goal removes misunderstandings, puts us back on track if we went off on a tangent, and makes it easy to keep each other honest to stop typing when the clock goes off.

It requires a lot more of my energy and discipline to run pomodoros by myself. Distractions and shortcuts are all around me.

Focusing is like doing push ups. The more you do, the easier it gets.

After a couple of months working almost by myself, I wasn’t using pomodoros that much, I moved to a new team where we decided to use the technique on day one. The first few iterations were difficult for me to keep my focus since I was no longer used to the time constraint. The tomato would go off and I was just starting to get into the groove. Or I could not wait for the timer to finish because I wanted to check twitter, my email, etc …

A few days ago, a coworker that popped into our area commented on the noise level in our room. He was surprised that we could get any work done: a meeting was happening at the other end of our table and we were surrounded by 2 conference calls on speaker phone.

We run 5 to 9 pomodoros a day (yeah, meetings suck). When the timer starts, the whole room disappears, there is no noise but our conversation. It takes milliseconds to get into the groove. We are also pretty good at locking the screen as soon as we hear the bell. It has become an habit.

And at the end of the day, the sense of accomplishment is clearer. We can recall the different episodes where we reached our goal and how much progress we have done since we started in the morning.

This post was written in 2 pomodoros.