Entrepreneur Solo

A few weeks ago I made an idiot of myself on Twitter by referring as an authority who speaks Spanish to a Pomodoro as an apple. Obviously it is a tomato, an Italian tomato. But enough levity (I know! You probably had to be there. The problem is my icon on my Desktop Pomodoro looks like an Apple and as I work on a Mac I sort of had Apple running through my head a bit. That’s my excuse anyway.)

The Pomodoro Technique - Clearly a Tomato

However the Pomodoro is a technique, and a fantastic technique at that! I was introduced to this technique through one of my many virtual mentors Ed Dale, thanks Ed. I am getting so much more done thanks to this. (And we will be having a post about Mentoring soon)

So what is the Pomodoro technique and how can it benefit an entrepreneur? The technique is basically a time you set aside and focus on doing something. All of the distractions, and when we are talking about working on a computer we mean Twitter, iChat, Facebook, IM etc… disappear, we totally ignore the phone and email and we get down to some serious work.

A Pomodoro is a period of time that you set aside and you work, work and then do some more work. You then take a short break, 5 minutes by default and if you want you start another, and another and another. How do you do it? Well there’s an app for that. The Mac app is here.
http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com

You set it for a time period and get writing. Now it is absolutely amazing what you can do in the standard 25 minutes afforded by the Pomodoro. I have got so far with this as to have finished four articles that I will then let cook over the next day before doing the editing and getting them onto the blogs.
In order to get rid of all of the distractions of course you want to make sure that your desktop loses its clutter. I personally, again on a Mac use the Ommwriter. This blanks out everything about your desktop and plays you birdsong or whatever, (you have a choice) in the background while you hear your fingers tapping out your articles. It sounds weird but it works fantastically. There are other apps available for doing this but Ommwriter is the one for me. And the best part of it both apps are free. (Unless you need to buy a Macbook to actually get some work done and increase your productivity ten times. I am sure that PC versions exist)

So if you put the term Pomodoro into Twitter you get the following. Lots of it in Italian of course but you can usually find an app to use to do it yourself. http://twitter.com/#search?q=Pomodoro

My best ever Pomodoro session involved four of them on a train at night between Alicante and Valencia, nothing interesting going on outside the window, it was dark and a seat handily placed next to a socket to plug the Macbook in. I managed to do eight articles in total. That was my autoresponder sorted for the next few weeks for people.Since I started using the technique not only does my blog get updated much more regularly but also and this is probably more important I have been able to start a few more blogs as well that I am enjoying writing too, this one is a good example. I feel I have much more time because now I know that a simple Pomodoro can make me a week’s content. Before I used to prevaricate the balls out of everything.

What productivity techniques do you use to make sure you get your content out there? And if you use the Pomodoro technique what do you use it for and how do you find it?

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