It's as bad as I thought!

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Every day I click on the little daily tasks in Bing to earn my 5 or 10 points. Generally they say something like ‘learn about something-or-other’ or they have a subject heading. Today one of them said ‘Time management’ and it led to search results about the ‘Pomodoro technique’. Normally I just click to get the points and don’t even read what comes up, but this caught my eye – apparently it’s a time management technique which basically involves setting a timer so you concentrate on work for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, then 25 minutes of work, a 5 minute break and so on, then have a longer break after four cycles. I do normally intersperse work with other things, but since I’m at home there are days when the ‘other things’ basically take over the entire day! I make coffee, read a few emails, look something up and then get distracted when one thing leads to another, put some washing in the machine, do some meal prep., have another coffee, fill the bird feeders and watch the birds, look for potential holiday accommodation, maybe do some work in the garden if it’s a nice day, and of course spend some time on here. So you can see how my time easily gets filled up and it takes me a long time to actually get any work finished! I thought I would test out this method and see what happened. Well you probably won’t be surprised by the outcome. Twenty-five minutes straight without allowing myself any distractions seemed like a long time, while a five-minute break went past in a flash and could easily turn into 15 minutes. I did get a lot more work done though! On the downside, I realised why I haven’t experienced any back or neck problems from working on a computer (in my case a laptop). It’s basically because I never normally sit still for long enough! To get through several 25-minute stretches I have had to raise the laptop on a box and use an external keyboard. What do you do to make sure you get your work done and it doesn’t just ‘expand to fill the time available’? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.