A tomato a day keeps the defects away

Recently I've been getting some odd stares from people passing by my desk. This was because on my desktop I have a large stopwatch prominently displayed in my work environment. This was not a brazen attempt to count down the hours until  I could go home. I was following a recommended practice to break my work patterns in order to increase my productivity.

A good technique is to take brief but regular breaks. I can sometimes fall into the habit of focusing on a problem too much to the detriment of other things, sometimes even forgetting to take lunch until much later in the day. 

A solution is to adhere to the Pomodoro Technique  which means tomato in Italian. In this approach, team members work in 30 minute increments. At the start of the increment, a timer is set for 25 minutes. The team works diligently during that time without distractions. Those emails and phone calls can wait. When timer goes off, then team takes a five minute break at which they can walk around, stretch etc. However that time should not be used to talk shop. It really is a break from work. When that break is up, you repeat the process. Every fourth Pomodoro you take a longer break i.e. 15 minutes.

• Choose a task to be accomplished
• Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
• Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings
• Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
• Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

Although I still a Pomodoro newbie, I’ve found it useful to focus my work into manageable slices. As a Scrum practitioner, I can focus on a particular story and finish a task within a single increment. I've become accustomed to breaking a story I’m working on into several small tasks. I'm a big fan of Pivotal Tracker. In Pivotal, I can decompose stories into tasks, each of which are easily understandable and trackable so I can gauge my progress.

Normally if one was following Pomodoro you would have a physical kitchen timer on the desk but I’m a techie, I’ve found there are numerous online alternatives. A good one is http://tomatoi.st/bcdg.