My Favorite Productivity Method

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about My Favorite Productivity Method. Let's hop into it. 

The Pomodoro Method

So in order to explain what my favorite productivity Method is and why it's my favorite, I first need to explain the type of worker that I am. I've used this terminology in the past, but there are two types of thinkers. There's the convergent thinker and there's the divergent thinker. The convergent thinker is the person who takes a lot of information that's given to them and basically condenses it into a single line of thinking. It's also known as linear thinking. Now the divergent thinker is the person who basically thinks divergently: many thoughts going in many different directions. That is the exact type of thinker that I am. I'm interested in many things. I'm curious about a lot of things. It also makes me a particularly distracted person. And as it is, I spend a lot of time on social media because I'm a creator and that's part of the job. But being on social media makes me even more distracted. Layer that, you know, my natural type of thinking with the type of work that I do today. So as many of you know, I moved from the CEO role to the executive chairman role at this point, I think five or six months ago. And when I was in the CEO role running the day-to-day of the business, it was highly structured. I knew what I was doing for most moments of my day. But in the executive chairman role, it's completely changed. I basically went from very structured to completely unstructured, and I've had these types of fluctuations in my career where I moved from super-structured to very unstructured from time to time. So to give you a sense, my first job out of college, I was working at Morgan Stanley and my role was extremely structured. As a trader, I knew what I was going to be doing basically from the moment that I stepped into the office to the moment that left. I was going to be trading and I was going to be trading on behalf of clients. Then I left Morgan Stanley. I started working at Morning Brew. This is when I was literally the only person full-time. My co-founder Austin was still in college and it went to a completely blank slate, totally unstructured. I had to create my schedule from scratch. Fast forward Morning Brew is growing. I'm a manager, I'm now delegating responsibility, focusing on strategy and hiring. And my time gets more structured because rather than doing all of these different things that I could be doing, I have to focus on having meetings with my direct reports, having meetings with other managers or my co-founder, and those things are set in the calendar. Well, now get back to today as the executive chairman, my time is totally unstructured and for the divergent mind, that can be really, really difficult. And what I found is that I needed some tool, a productivity tool, anything, that would keep me focused, provide structure to this very unstructured period of time that I'm working in, and be realistic about the way in which my brain works. That's what brings in the Pomodoro Method. So the Pomodoro technique, it was developed in the late eighties, by, at the time a university student, his name is Francesco Cirillo. And what the issue was, is Francesco was struggling to focus on his studies and complete assignments on time. And in this feeling of overwhelm, he basically tried to make things as approachable as possible. And he asked himself to commit to just 10 minutes of focused study time before taking a break. And he became encouraged by this challenge. He ended up finding a tomato timer in his kitchen. Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato. And that is what ended up leading to the Pomodoro technique being born. Cirillo ended up going on to write 130-page book about the Pomodoro method, but don't be daunted by how long the book is. It's actually incredibly simple method, which is what makes it so great to use it as a framework for working. 

How the method works

So let me break down the method, and then I'm going to talk about why it's so helpful. Very simply, this is how the Pomodoro method works. First, you pick a task. Second, you set a 25-minute timer. It could be your phone. It could be a tomato kitchen timer. It could be a timer on your computer. You start doing work on the task that you picked for those 25 minutes. Then the alarm goes off at 25 minutes. That's when you take a five-minute break. This 30-minute increment is what is known as a Pomodoro 25 minutes of focused work, and five minutes of rest or break. What you end up doing is you do four Pomodoros, so four 30 minutes cycles, and then after the fourth, you take a longer 15- to 30-minute break to basically recoup. There are three additional rules to the Pomodoro method. First is you need to break complex projects into smaller, actionable steps. And so the rule of thumb is if there's any project or task that is going to take you more than four Pomodoros, or two hours, you need to make that task smaller and make it into more incremental steps. Second, group small tasks together, so that if you're in the middle of a Pomodoro or a 25-minute work cycle, and say, you finish your task in 10 minutes, you have 15 minutes left, rather than going to take a break, you have another small task that you've grouped with this one to start working on. And that leads to the third and final rule of the Pomodoro method, which is once the timer is set, it must ring for you to change your behavior. You should not ever finish a task and then go check social media or your email like you would during a break, move on to your next task when the timer rings and you get your five-minute break or your 25-minute break, if you're at the end of four Pomodoros, that's when you can go take your break and spend time on social media or do whatever you want to do. 

Why this simple tool is amazing

So that is how the Pomodoro method works. Now, let me talk about why it's so helpful. First, it is an amazing tool for fighting procrastination. Procrastination isn't about laziness or lack of self-control like most people think it is. The reason we procrastinate is because we are trying to avoid negative feelings. And in the context of work, we're trying to avoid the negative feeling of the mental struggle that occurs when we're working on a really hard or daunting task. So the more daunting or large a project is, say you think a project is going to take dozens of hours, the more likely you are to procrastinate on it. And so with the Pomodoro Method, when you break a big project into bite-sized chunks, it helps you fight the urge to procrastinate. And here's how I think about it. If you want to build a habit like exercise, the way you build a gym habit is not by going to the gym seven days a week, 90 minutes a day for all seven days. You start with something more approachable, something like going to the gym two days a week. And rather than doing a 90 minute workout, you walk, something that will allow you to stay consistent with the habit you're building. So the first thing the Pomodoro Method does is it breaks procrastination. The second thing it does is it helps you manage distractions. So if something like email or social media gets your attention and gets you out of the zone, think how hard it is to get back in the zone. People talk about flow state and work. When you're taking out a flow state, getting back in takes 30 to 60 minutes on its own. And what's great about the Pomodoro Method is it's not trying to remove distractions from your life. It's not trying to get you to not use social media. It's simply just creating a separate place for them to exist. And what this allows you to do is it allows you to stay focused, but also helps you resist the temptation to check your phone, because, you know, at some point very soon in the next 25 minutes maximum, you'll be able to intentionally check email, check, social media, scroll through TikTok, etcetera.

Number three, the Pomodoro Method brings awareness to how you spend your time. As workers, we tend to underestimate the time needed to complete projects and we also tend to underestimate the time we end up being distracted, scrolling through social media. The Pomodoro technique brings awareness to how long things take in general and how long you're spending on social media and other cheap activities. By working in short time sessions, whether it's 25 minutes or 30 minutes, you find out exactly how long tasks take, which makes you far more accurate at estimating how long specific and similar tasks will take in the future. It also prevents you from doing something that is a constant struggle of mine, which is, you know, I'll have a list of my priorities for the day, say there's six or seven priorities. I'll start with the first one. And all of a sudden seven hours later, I'm still working on that first priority. By breaking things into these Pomodoros or these 30-minute chunks, it makes you have to be intentional about continuing to spend time on the same exact task without moving on. 

Tomatoes make work fun

The fourth thing that the Pomodoro technique does is it just makes working fun. Working typically isn't fun. It feels very dry. It feels very antiquated. There's all these traditional approaches. And what the Pomodoro technique does is it creates a game, it gamifies the whole process of working where you can work towards improving by adding more and more Pomodoros in a string before having to take a long break. And it just makes things less painful. You're talking about things in the context of tomatoes, rather than the context of minutes or hours. 

And the final benefit of the method is it's also just a good way to put a natural cap on the length of meetings. I've talked a lot about this in past Founder’s Journal episodes, but I think 90% of meetings are a waste of time and the 10% that should be meetings are not run effectively by having a 25-minute chunk max of focus time. That basically means you have an excuse to host meetings that are always under 25 minutes, which I think is an amazing way to stay productive while hosting meetings. 

To recap 

So I've talked about the type of worker I am. I've talked about what the Pomodoro Method is and why it's so useful. Now, I want to make it practical and talk about how you can actually start using it today. If you want to try the Pomodoro Method, start by creating a list of your absolute priorities that you need to get done. Those priorities that if you don't get them done by the end of the day, you won't feel like it's a successful day. Then try to make sure those priorities are manageable tasks and estimate the amount of Pomodoros that they take. And the reason you do this is then you know, say you work an eight-hour day in general. You can only have 16 Pomodoros max, because remember a Pomodoro is 25 minutes of focused work with five minute rest. And so that's 30 minutes. And so you can only do 16 Pomodoros in your day. By equating your priorities to how many Pomodoros they should take, you basically get a sense of, are you being realistic with the things you want to accomplish today? Once you've set up your priorities, you think you have a realistic list that is within the total number of Pomodoros you can do in your day, you start the process with your most important task and you follow the 25-minute focus, five-minute rest cadence. You do that for four Pomodoros, and then you take a larger break. Over time, as you start doing this technique, you're going to get a better sense of how to estimate the time that it will take tasks to be complete and you'll get a sense if 25 and five is the right cadence for you. Maybe it's something like 45 minutes on and 10 minutes off or 30 minutes on. And 10 minutes off. Everyone has a different balance that works for them to maintain focus, but also need rest. 25 and five is what works for me, but it may not be what works for you. So to recap, when you are struggling with procrastination or an endless to-do list, if you're someone who is a divergent thinker like me, or you tend to get distracted, give the Pomodoro Method a shot. Pick one task, set a 25-minute timer, then put your head down and work on that task for the full 25 minutes. When the timer goes off, give yourself that five-minute break that you earned. 

Thank you 

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