Productivity books and blogs will often point to the Pomodoro Technique as an effective way to get things done. The method involves working (or studying) for say 25 minutes, taking a short five minute break and repeating this process three or four times. After three or four intervals of this, one can take a longer break of say 30 minutes. There are many reasons why people like this method, but I’ve found that there are two reasons in particular that make it effective for difficult work, especially writing.
- It builds momentum
Difficult tasks have a significant sense of inertia associated with them. You have to expend an extreme amount of energy to just get started. Easier tasks are usually associated with things that have less unknowns, things that you’ve done before, things that don’t require heavy mental lifting, and things that don’t tend to paralyse you with doubt. So, since easier tasks don’t have the same inertial heaviness about them, you just don’t tend to procrastinate as much on them.
Hard tasks are different. The doubt, the difficulty, the discomfort all serve to immobilise you. For me a good example of this is writing a fiction scene that’s not yet clear in my mind. I have to find clarity first—but then I can also get kind of paralysed by the question: Is this thing moving in the right direction?
Well, truth is there’s no way to tell, but if I don’t write something, I’ll never know. So, working on the scene (and suffering through a few hours) just builds some momentum, and momentum helps with motion.
- Completion is not the goal
If I had to focus on the total amount of time it took me to write certain works of fiction, I’d go a little crazy. Some stories that I’ve written, I’ve re-written a few times over. Sometimes I keep the story more or less consistent while dropping all of the prose. Other times the story changes. Needless to say, there are always many hurdles to actually finishing the work. Often there’s no telling how long it might take to finish it. Most of the time I don’t mind re-doing certain things, especially if the story deserves it. But I definitely don’t try to finish a story in a certain amount of time. For me, that just doesn’t work. What works better is to dedicate a few hours each day to writing. That way I don’t focus just on finishing but rather creating something that I’m proud of.