Be more productive: Pomodoro technique for the win!
Hello everyone. I hope everyone is safe and well in this trying times.
I want to talk about Pomodoro technique and how you can adapt it to your teams in this article.
Pomodoro Technique is a time management method where you work for 25 minutes followed by a 5 minute break. The name has an interesting story. Pomodoro means 'tomato' in Italian. When Francesco Cirillo, developer of the method, was a university student, he used a tomato shaped kitchen timer and therefore the name Pomodoro! I always find this story very inspiring because it reminds me the importance of simplicity and sometimes overthinking can be very limiting in our lives. The technique itself is also very simple and highly effective when working especially in our line of work.
Sometimes when we have to do something, solve a problem or accomplish an objective, it can be very overwhelming and we tend to procrastinate time to time. But when you break down your problem or objective into little pieces, you will find that it is not that hard as you may think it is. This is where Pomodoro technique comes in handy.
This is how it works:
- Choose a task.
- Set your timer to 25 minutes.
- Take a 5 minute break when the timer rings.
- Every 4 Pomodoro, take a 15 to 30 minute long break.
That's all.
So what are the benefits of this technique?
- It helps you focus deeply in a short time to an important task.
- It prevents burnout from working for too long.
- It informs your co-workers that you are concentrated on a task and prevents being interrupted when you are focused.
- It makes you more efficient since you start timing your tasks and see how much you spend on which task.
These are the most observed pros of this technique when you do a quick research on the internet. But who knows? You may discover whole new benefits for your work system when you give it a try.
Especially now, because of this pandemic, most of us are working from home. We are trying to adapt and discovering new challenges of working remotely every day. We are all trying to get things done in between online meetings. We can't deny the psychological effects of this pandemic and I personally find it very hard to concentrate on a task. We, as a team at Kod Gemisi, have been using this technique for a long time now and personally it really helped me to focus on the tasks that I have been avoiding for some time. That's why we decided to develop a plugin for Jira in order to adapt it to our daily lives more efficiently.
We present you Domat Pomodoro for Jira plugin. It is just for Cloud now but we are working on a Server version as well. It is a free plugin so you can install and start using it. Domat is a shorter version of the word domates which also means 'tomato' in Turkish :)
So how do we use this plugin? When you are working on an issue, all you have to do is click on the start button and your pomodoro begins. After 25 minutes you get a notification that your pomodoro is done. When a pomodoro is finished a worklog is automatically logged and you can change the details of the worklog if you like.
Another benefit of this plugin is that you can see which co-workers are in Pomodoro and which ones are not. This will help you avoid disturbing people when they are focused and also prevent others disturbing you. Also you can see who was online and active on Jira in the last 10 minutes.
As I said, we have been using this technique and find it very helpful and hope this plugin helps you and your team to adapt to Pomodoro technique as well!
Cheers!
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Elifcan Cakmak
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