The most important tool for time management: the timer

Get up in the morning and a new day begins.

Francisco Cyrillo's Tomato Work Method is a 25 minutes plus 5 minutes timer. 25 minutes is working time and 5 minutes is the rest time.

Once the 25-minute timer is activated, you are asked to stay focused on the work you are working on during that time period. As soon as the end rings, you'll immediately stop what you're doing and start the 5-minute break timer.

Many people will say that I was 5 minutes away from the work I had at hand, so. It doesn't matter if you extend the 25-minute timer to 30 minutes. That seems like a good idea. Although the break broke the time period of timekeeping. But more work was done. Doing so has an invisible destructive effect, and if you get used to not following the time of the timer, you may become disrespectful to the timer and eventually become habitually disobedient to the timer. Once not following the timer becomes a habit, your work and life reduce certainty and increase randomness and uncertainty.

You start a 50-minute timer and want to watch a TV series in those 50 minutes, because after 50 minutes, you have to start a learning task. But at 50 minutes, the timer bell rings, you really don't want to stop and watch the TV series, you may just let yourself watch episode after episode, and you will find all kinds of reasons for yourself to prove that you should do this, and then you may give yourself all kinds of empty promises to learn after watching this episode. This is called "non-compliance with the timer".

On the surface, "not following the timer" at work is to do more work, out of "good intentions". But once you activate the "non-compliance timer" mode, not only will you not comply at work, you will more often not comply when you are not working. You may even find a good reason for yourself, which is that I have done more work, so I should give myself more rest. So, disrespecting the timer is a double-edged sword.

When you break any one timer, you actually break your overall time management. If you set the working time to be 30 minutes and actually work for 40 minutes. Then these 10 minutes must have been "stolen" from somewhere else. Your other work time period becomes 20 minutes. Or your rest time is taken up. If you turn on a 5-minute break timer and actually take a 30-minute break, that extra 25 minutes of rest actually takes up time for doing other things. You're going to ruin it all the time.

A lot of people like to sleep late. It may not be intentional, and sometimes it may be that it is too late to look at the phone and go to bed late if you are not careful. I used to start a one-hour timer at night and go to bed when I wanted to watch an hour. If you don't respect this timer, you will watch for two hours and three hours. Causes you to sleep two hours late. The result at this time is to "advance" the time of day 2. If you sleep an hour or two late, you will most likely wake up an hour or two later on day 2. If you still get up normally, then you are probably in a bad state on day 2. The effect is not 1-2 hours but a whole day. When you are not in the state, even if it takes 10 hours, it is not as effective as the two hours of the state. So that's the consequence of not respecting the timer. Scientific research has found that once you sleep less, the time you sleep less can never be made up.

When we wake up every morning, we actually start the day's timer. If you wake up at 6:00 and go to bed at 10:00 p.m., you start a large timer that lasts 16 hours. In this 16-hour large timer, you might start a small timer one by one. For example, if you go to work at 9 o'clock, then you have a small timer from 6:00 am to 9:00 am, and you need to complete some things during this time, such as preparing breakfast, eating breakfast, sending your children to school, and taking the car to work. If you don't follow this timer, if you're late for work, then you could be penalized.

When you go to work, you start another small timer, which is a working timer from 9 o'clock to 6 o'clock in the evening. In this work, you can also start a smaller timer in stages, such as setting yourself a Pomodoro, which is a small 25-minute timer.

When it comes to the lunch break, the lunch break timer is activated, so during the lunch break, during this time period, the things you have to complete are to eat, move a little, take a nap, etc., and prepare for the afternoon work.

When we learn to respect the timer. You can do things more methodically, and you can do what you want to do more efficiently. Without respect for the timer, no matter what the reason, the result is that your time becomes more chaotic, you don't get a good rest when it's time to rest, and you don't get a good time when you're working.

The most important tool for time management is the timer. To learn to use a timer, you must first start by respecting the timer. Respect your every time period of time.

Today is a wonderful day.