4 ways to maximise deep work with the Pomodorro focus technique

The Pomodorro technique was the first productivity hack I ever tried. It's simple: 25 minutes of uninterrupted work (completely uninterrupted!) with a five-minute break in between and a 20-minute break once you've completed four. It's an incredibly simple and powerful tool if used in the right way for the right tasks.

Here are four lessons I learned after Pomming for a couple of years:

1. Competition is king. We had a scoreboard to tally the number of Poms we did each day. At the end of each week, the winner was titled and loser shamed. It was a trivial reward/punishment but extremely effective.

2. Know your limit. We were in a distraction-free environment and incredibly focussed writing on a single topic for four years. Even with these environmental advantages (compared to most office workers who have multiple tasks), our brains were fired after eight Poms; six Poms was a good day. This is consistent with Ericsson et al.'s (1993) literature review findings on the limits to intense concentration: around an hour for amateurs and up to four hours for experts.

3. Get team buy-in. When the Pom countdown timer was on (we both used an app that displayed a small timer), we knew not to distract each other. This was a lot easier because we'd both bought into the technique and knew the impact of a distraction. It's a lot more difficult to implement this kind of thing if the people you work with don't understand what Pomming is and why you're doing it.

4. It's not for every task. Pomming is great when you want a little adrenaline kick from racing the clock; if you're trying to absorb new information, it's not the right technique.

Luke Hurst is the Managing Director of Building 20; a Melbourne-based niche consultancy that delivers affordable, data-driven programs to organisations to reduce distraction and optimise productivity.