Need to Make Time for Yourself? Pretend You're Cooking Pasta

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We’ve covered overcoming procrastination plenty of times on BNET, offering advice to help you meet your professional deadlines. But what if your time management problem is more subtle — you get every project to your boss on time but when it comes to making time for self-development or an enriching side project you never manage to find a minute.

Writing on blog Workshifting, which caters to independent contractors and freelancers, Heather Rast explores her issue with what she terms “soft deadlines.” She explains that her problem is an “inability to consistently keep a commitment to myself. I do just fine with other people.” But Rast feels she might actually have found something that helps, a time management system with the unusual name of the Pomodoro Technique.

So what does pasta sauce have to do with finding time for your own projects and learning within your jam-packed days? Rast explains that the technique comes down to setting strict time limits for tasks and using a timer to keep on schedule, and outlines the basic steps:

Plan your day’s tasks. Not a full week’s worth of stuff, but just for today. Choose one task. Give yourself a hard 25 minutes to work on it. Set a timer. Work on the task. When time’s up, put a check mark next to the task. Take a five-minute break. Stretch, check email, send a tweet, etc. Repeat steps 3-5. When complete, start back on step 2 and repeat. Every four pomodoros (increments of 25-min work), take a longer break. Assess your progress. Assemble your thoughts on what’s needed to complete the open tasks.

Rast remains a little skeptical that this cookery-inspired idea will be enough to hold her back from the many distractions of being a busy working mom (read the rest of her interesting post about the particulars of her situation), but she’s willing to give it a try. And there’s reason to believe it just might work — using timers to help break our anxiety is a well established technique to overcome writer’s block and could work in other arenas.

Have you found any ways to trick yourself into making time for yourself despite your packed schedule?

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