Everyone knows that just by splitting your tasks into focused 25-minute increments, and like listing them out with proper prioritization, and fixing bum in chair daily — such is the simple key to knocking the wind out of your to-do list and achieving your dreams.
But what you may not know is that behind the veil of effortless productivity lie five hidden secrets…
I donned my investigative journalism hat and went undercover. I did it for your sake. This is what I found.
Secret #1
Here’s how Pomodoros actually work.
When you do the first one, you won’t achieve really anything worthwhile.
The next five or twenty, you’ll feel a vague sense of progress but still, you won’t, say, finish anything important.
After maybe a year or so, long after you’ve forgotten what the hell a Pomodoro is anyway, you’ll look back — and it will suddenly make sense. You’ll see that you have indeed actually Gotten Things Done.
Secret #2
Speaking of Getting Things Done, or GTD, not to be confused with GTL, there’s a secret to that as well.
That secret is: to do lists exist as a way to offload all the dumb crap that you’re just never ever fucking going to do.
Here’s how that works: add around one million items to your to do list.
Then, never do them at all.
Every day when you’re all like “hey I wonder what should I do?!” you should do the following: just think for a minute about what seems important and then do that thing.
Maybe every so often you’ll slip up and do a thing on your to do list. That’s okay. Just ignore or delete the rest, at least a 10:1 ratio of not-doing:doing. This will ensure that you stay mentally fresh and physically spry.
Secret #3
If anyone asks you to do something, first consider whether you give a shit really at all.
If you do, cool, take five and do the thing, unless it’s annoyingly complex or tedious, in which case, hmmm…can you get someone else to do it, or make the progenitor of the task just kind of forget about it completely after a week or two?
If you give no shits whatsoever, stay silent. If anyone hassles you, forward them your new “email policy” about how you have a doctor’s note precluding you from reading or writing more than five words at a time, or some such.
Secret #4
Really and truly, the only way to ever get anything done at all is to use the doing of one thing as the means of procrastination for the other thing.
Even then, results not guaranteed! But, if you have enough things to switch between, given enough time, you’ll start to accidentally make progress on all of them. This will feel like magic and let me tell you, it kind of is.
The more fun ones will progress fastest, which of course is as it should be.
Secret #5
Every so often, say every 20 minutes give or take, you’ll have to take a short break to run over to the mini basketball hoop attached to your bathroom door and shoot a few shots.
And by a few, I mean somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to 400 shots on that mini basketball hoop.
This is to clear your mind, and all that. Seriously, it’s one of the best meditation techniques around. Don’t take my word for it, go on and try it out!
(The mini basketball hoop you’re looking for is this one.)
And that’s really all there is to it.