Eat that frog with a Pomodoro

Let us start with a meme

You see? Haven’t we all experienced something like this? Procrastination gets all of us in one way or the other and the most ironic thing is that its not your fault entirely. To put it scientifically, procrastination falls down to the battle between the two parts of brain i.e. limbic system and prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is associated with pleasure center whereas the prefrontal cortex is concerned with planning, logical thinking and decision making. Being the smaller resident of our skulls, prefrontal cortex usually gets dominated by its fellow neighbor and therefore, we succumb to the temptations of procrastination.

If you look at the title of my blog, there are two things that stand out, a frog and a Pomodoro. Frog is subjective term, it describes what is the thing that you absolutely hate to do and in turn, start procrastinating over it. Most of us have few frogs in our life that we avoid at all cost. Whereas Pomodoro is the solution for that frog.

In late 1980s, Francesco Cirillo, an Italian national, came up with a technique to overcome the frogs in his life which later became a technique to tackle the frogs of other people’s lives as well. It involves breaking down of work into smaller parts spanning over 25 minutes length and followed by a small break of 5 minutes. The person using this technique repeats the process described again and again until he/she reach their desired goal or result.

For me, my messy closet has always been a frog. I detest even the foggiest notion of making my wardrobe presentable. So, I could not find any place more suitable to apply the Pomodoro technique. What I usually do with my clothes is I roll them up and throw them in the cupboard.

In the application of this technique, firstly I switched off wi-fi. I set a timer of 25 minutes on my cellphone. One by one, I wrapped my clothes (trousers, shalwar kameez, jeans, shirts etc.) very neatly. Gradually, I arranged all the clothes on the bed and the timer rang.

I went outside my room to wander here and there, seeing what others are doing and came back five minutes later which eventually turned out to be 10 minutes. Wasting no more time, I set the timer again for 25 minutes and began to place the properly wrapped clothes in the closet. To my astonishment, I was able to complete the whole task with 10 minutes still remaining. The result and its importance were quite visible to me now.

So, what I came to conclude is that I was nowhere near adjusting my closet for the past two months. Many of the times, its my mother who always make my wardrobe suitable and presentable and after two months of unpresentable and ugly looking wardrobe, the sight of a properly arranged and neat wardrobe was more than a calming spectacle for me. Hence by applying the Pomodoro technique, I was able to eat my frog.

I plan to make Pomodoro technique a habit in order to eat all those frogs that made me procrastinate and top of my list is workout. I plan to apply to achieve intense workout that I fail to achieve most of the times to get myself in a physically fit and agile form. So, my advice to you if you plan to make yourself a better person, start applying it as it will help you achieve your maximum potential