How a 25 Minute Habit Helps You Find Your Flow!
Start your flow by focusing on a 25-minutes block session. This helps you become more productive, but you’ll also “get more time” that can be spent doing the fun things in life.
Take it from someone who loves productivity hacks in a very creative environment — split your time on sessions works.
Time management its a challenge in a work from the mode. Odds are you’re bombarded with work tasks, home projects, side projects, Tweets, inbox sounds, memes, news, lengthy to-do lists, and constant emails.
So, how do you get it all done most efficiently in fully remote work?
I’ve been big on productivity hacks and tricks since I saw great results in my daily work but I tend always to keep things pretty simple with a todo list and hustling hard.
Caffeine, foods high in sugar and simple carbohydrates, and, perhaps most interestingly, our body’s own stress hormones are artificial ways to pump our energy but all of this impacts our health — So let’s talk about happiness and efficiency as a full word: productivity.
Remember that the productivity theory of small batches from Lean Manufacturing, which is often called just-in-time manufacturing.
This is a good idea for new modern work too. This helps you to reduce waste, encouraging experimentation, and making everyone happy especially for designers, entrepreneurs, developers, inside sellers, and home-students.
The idea of splitting up my workday and leave those long chunks of time by increasing my productivity seemed to be a total unproductivity idea but I tried in last months. — How could working less actually help me accomplish more?
One possible solution is to use a popular time blocking system called the Pomodoro Technique — Yes there are hundreds of articles about this but read my small splitting hack!
The idea behind the Pomodoro Technique is to break down all of your tasks into 25-minute time blocks. This popular time-management method was invented by Italian Francesco Cirillo1980 (there are a good number of well-known Italians like Pareto, Fibonacci…)
Between each time block, there is a five-minute break. And after completing four Pomodoros you take a longer break — usually 15 to 30 minutes.
I discovered that you could learn how to improve your effectiveness and be better able to estimate how long a task will take to complete by recording how you utilize your time. — Francesco Cirillo
Why is Effective Time Management Important?
The more time you “give” a project, the longer you’ll take to complete it. Have a deadline a week from now? Odds are you’ll take the full week to do it.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. — The Parkinson’s Law
The best way to combat this Law is to manufacture very strict deadlines with yourself because every hour that’s wasted is an hour you won’t get back.
So, it all depends on time. Time is the reason.
How a 25 Minute Habit Helps You Master Time
With a block of time-related to how long you can focus on a task without feeling distracted is one key reason to start measuring your productivity.
So the reason to start with a 25 session is not about split your work or be a master in time management is related to measuring. When you start your own records you can find the path to your flow.
Flow is the original reason. Flow is what athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs achieve after a well-structured way of working.
Feeling distracted is the key. Understand when you are getting in an anti-flow mode is crucial for increasing productivity, remember every time you stop the clock, remember every interruption and make a list of those ‘holes of time’. Reduce randomly working on side-projects. Instead, create a plan for the important tasks and work on each with a completely focused mindset. Have a random mind or create some creative jumps between your sessions is something that maybe you will not stop but reduce a lot. Chris Baily called this as a Scaterfocus mode.
Working for only a short length of 25 minutes is not long enough for the average employee and entrepreneur to get tasks done, just when they get into flow state they have to pull themselves out of it to take a mandatory break.
Blocks
The way I use this method is to work in multiples of the 25-minute block but I started using blocks of 35 min since I started needing more time for my tasks.
Easy tasks (low level of concentration) can be completed in 50-minute (2 blocks)or 1 hour and 15-minute (3 blocks) blocks of time like answering emails, set-up a marketing campaign inside Facebook, creating an inbox conversation for inside leads.
Harder tasks (high level of concentration) can be completed using the standard 25-minute block of time or 35 min depends on you like writing an article, solving a code problem, or even solve a mathematical equation.
Distractions and interruptions
Measure and list your distractions like social media, emails, notifications, kids, news, future tasks.
Without this, you won't conquer your flow. You need to list those interruptions and reduce it at most. Of course, never get your parents with no answer. Family first! After some interruptions, 10 minutes of work is still work.
Social media & Communication
If you are a very connected person inside Twitter, Linkedin, Tik-Tok or other social media and community groups try to have 5 to 10min of social media engagement every 2 blocks. Why? This is especially for entrepreneurs, coders, and makers, guys an opportunity can be in the next corner so try to be a very connected person and that consumes your time. most of what you consume will follow this trend — We can further separate the most useful things we consume from the least useful!
Slack! Teams! WhatsApp! Zoom!
Yes these three words mean communication, if you work inside a vibrant company or startup you will be appreciated in relation to your chat response time. Which in some cases includes talking to people through email, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook.
So after a block of time trying to rest and start communication. Accumulate a bunch of interruptions every 25 to 35 min is great for your management.
Breaks
Breaks are not optional. Get up and take a break. You need this time for your mind to relax and to get energized for that next task.
If the task is the same task you can try to walk, wash dishes (Bill Gates do this and Melinda is happy), draw something. Watch something very creative — sometimes I just go inside portfolios in Dribble, Behance, or Codepen.
So, here is my hack. I discovered that 25 min is not enough but after 30min my focus decay a lot. I always asked for 5 min more in my Pomodoro tool.
A 35 min session is great for me after being a focus for 35 min with almost none interruptions I open my communications scanning fast for any urgent chat that took less than 1min.
After a very fast scanning of my email and chat channels, I get up the desk for a 5 min rest. After a break, I start a 10 min for team communication inside Slack, Teams, or even WhatsApp, after that I review social media looking for some engagement, news, valuable tweets, and creative information this took me less than 5 min.
Now we have 55 min of productive and supportive activities you have progressed in hard rocks and intangible assets the other 5 min to complete the full 60 min is added to the set-up.
The set-up means to open your folders, loading information, accessing Jira, read task stories, launching the environment, cleaning your desktop, grab a cup of coffee.
Conclusion
The idea of “embodied cognition” (the idea that how you look affects how you feel) is real, this idea applies to your brain and time management.
If you decide to implement this system you’ll be able to:
- Reduce a lot the multi-tasking habit.
- Focus on the task at hand.
- Decrease stress levels.
- Get more things done because.
- Avoid the perfectionist spirit.
- Build higher levels of concentration.
- Create a space for social media.
- Bring fast responses to emails and corporate communication.
- Bring mechanical tasks some of ‘automation’ by time management.
So, next time you’re trying to think of a way to change up your work routine (whether that means being more efficient or focused), start out by changing up your time management. This small change will help you to find your own workflow.
