Pomodoro

So lately I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about my time-management and work-life balance, so I thought today I’d just quickly share what I do and how I do it. Basically, this blog is the tip of the iceberg of the reading and writing I do, with many drafts about many other readings waiting in the wings to be polished up and posted, and significantly more that is never destined for the blog at all. It’s not easy to determine how many hours a day I need to spend reading for my qualifying exams (I do at least two daily, but it’s not unusual to do as much as twelve or fourteen), writing up the notes on those readings, writing my own research, reading for my own research, reading for classes, writing those notes, and researching and reading and writing for those classes too. It takes some juggling.

Part of what’s challenging about this lifestyle in which you are constantly overwhelmed by the work you need to do, very little of which you can easily finish in a normal eight-hour workday, is that we have huge blocks of unstructured time. This quarter, I go into campus two days a week, on Tuesdays for classes I’m taking and teaching, and then Thursday for the lecture for the course I’m assisting to teach. For some reason, some people I talk to seem to think this equals a four day weekend. I have to laugh, because if PhDs took four day weekends, it would take us fifteen years to get our degrees, and nobody wants that. What it really means is that I have five days of unstructured work time, four of which are consecutive. There are no days on which I do not read for a minimum of two hours, and very few days where I do not write a daily quota of two pomodoros (more on that in a sec) or 1000 words minimum. Normally I will read for two hours straight every morning before doing anything else. It’s honestly a pretty easy part of the job to get up at 6, make some coffee, and climb back into bed with a novel till 8 or 9 am, and it’s nice to feel like you’ve accomplished a daily task so early in the day.

It’s the writing that’s a little harder to figure out how to time-manage. Writing does not resemble a job like brick-laying, which is going to more or less require the same level of effort/time to lay. This means you can estimate how many bricks can be laid in a given hour by a given person. If the average is 1000 a day, then the guy who did 800 had a bad day, and the guy who did 1200 is doing great.  There is a measured and measurable expectation of productivity which makes assessment possible. Writing is not like this. Writing is a mercurial task. Sometimes you get the odd unicorn day where it just pours out of you comfortably and easily. Most of the time it’s hard work, and you remember that old Hemingway quote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” at least once as you sit there. And then there are the bad days, when you stare at the cursor malevolently blinking at you, and nothing comes. Those are the worst.

In terms of work-life balance, mental wellness, and the cultivation of a professional persona, those bad days are hard on morale. An unproductive day is a bad day, for the writer and the academic, as we measure (and ARE measured) largely by our output. So even if you had the best idea you’ve ever had in your life that day, unless you can put it on the page, it’s a bad day. When you do an eight hour day that yields nothing, and your materials are your brain and your words and your creativity, it can feel like you’re worth nothing. Our work is highly individual, and that lends a different, more personal quality to the nature of the labour we perform than, say, the labour of a person who sells DVDs at the HMV megastore. This is in no way an assessment or judgment of how hard these types of work are, if they can be compared at all. Rather, my impression here is that while all labour is soul sucking, writing is soul sucking in a more personal way, as it is fulfilling in a more personal way too, than, say,  ringing up movies all day at a cash register was for me.

It also means that the strategies in place to deal with the bad days need to be different person-to-person. There are as many strategies out there as there are people who use them. I’ve tried a lot of different ones, but the one I use the most is called the Pomodoro technique, or a version of it I’ve customized to my own work style.

The way it works is that you use a kitchen timer to help create focused windows of productive time. I put my phone and iPad onto airplane mode. I turn the wifi off on my laptop or I activate the SelfControl app if I need to be writing code. I keep a notebook and a pen in front of me, and my word document open in front of me, and I write. That’s it. You can write “I hate this why god why did I think this was a good idea please can’t I go back in time and just be an investment banker who hates her life in a NORMAL way because at least then I could afford avocados whenever I wanted them” over and over again for the entire allotted time. But you have to keep going. The one rule is Get it on the page. Paper or word processor. Doesn’t matter. But you have to keep writing until the timer goes off. No reading, no stopping, no distractions. If I get an idea or remember something, I’ll jot it down in the margins (Renew library books/ Check this reference/ find quote!) but that’s it. It’s HIIT for your writing.

Tons of people have a version of this, but this one is mine. A friend of mine is an occupational therapist who focuses on neuropsychology, and her dissertation focus was on the biomechanics of productivity. She told me about an article she had read that showed that productivity in the human brain usually taps out after 50 minutes, so I tried that out and now I like to do 50 minute Pomodoro intervals. I take ten minute breaks in between, and do a maximum of three before stopping for at least an hour. Doing 4 just burns me out and then, as my friend Bryan says, “you can’t chop with a blunt axe.” So today’s workday looks like this:

I read for 3 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on, 10 off, 50 on), had breakfast, and practiced the flute for an hour. Then I did my writing Pomodoros: 2 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on. Then I wrote this blog post (another 1000 words but I don’t count these to my academic writing quota). Now that I’ve hit my minimum quotas for the day I’m going to the gym, and then I’ll assess what kind of work I feel like continuing with in the evening. I think I feel like practicing Italian, and doing a few hours of work on a research project I work for. I don’t use the Pomodoro intervals in the evenings because their only purpose is to keep me on track for my daily quotas. Then I’ll read in bed until I fall asleep (Heart of Darkness tonight) and wake up and do it all over again. And that’s my life! I think it’s pretty great.