I have been hearing about “the Pomodoro method” for quite some time now and finally decided to try it for myself.

For the uninitiated, Pomodoro is a supposed productivity hack, consisting of 4 25-minute periods of work with 5 minute breaks in between. After 4 25-minute work periods, you then get a long break of 25 minutes. At least, this is the default. You can change the numbers around however you want.

All the apps do is time the intervals for you and sound alarms when time is up. I downloaded the first app that showed up when I searched “Pomodoro” in the App Store and immediately tried it out on the default settings.

This is what I learned:

• 25 minutes is so fast. 25 minutes seems like a perfect, undaunting amount of time. I was always surprised when time was up.
• Breaks aren’t rewarding unless you give yourself something nice to do. Mostly, I just wanted to continue working during breaks. But I started coloring and doing other fun stuff on breaks that made me like them more.
• You realize how often you just want to check your phone. I reached for my phone so many times, only to pull my hand away when I saw the timer ticking down. And 25 minutes is not a long time to respond to a text! They can wait.
• A good way to work on multiple tasks at once? This might go against the whole spirit of the technique, but I started using my breaks to work on other projects. I have a billion things to do! I kind of liked working on the immediate tasks while still making progress on longer term projects.
• Pomodoro means “tomato” in Italian and the original inventor still holds the copyright. The app I downloaded doesn’t mention the word “Pomodoro” anywhere, but it has the tell-tale tomato in its logo! This prompted me to look it up (on a break of course).

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I’m not sure if I will stick to the Pomodoro Technique. I think it would be useful for people who find themselves distracted a lot, but I resist anything that adds any structure to my day.

I might give it a go for another few days, but it definitely didn’t change my life.

​❤ Bayley​

"Hustle” seems to have entered our vernacular to mean “work very hard.” And I think it’s super weird that a term that used to refer to selling drugs has been sanitized and co-opted by bland techbros, who now use it to mean, “working on my app that’s like Uber for dogs.” (Interesting etymology on the term side-hustle here from Merriam-Webster.)

Another thing that’s happened with the term is it’s been strangely glamorized. Maybe our cabal of late capitalist overlords engineered these cute notebooks and plaques to normalize the idea of working every waking minute. (Jk. But really though.)

In a great example of the insufferable hustle culture, I ran across this Tweet recently with a screen shot of this post from LinkedIn.

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where bragging about how few hours of sleep we get is some kind of social currency?

Also like... toxic workplace culture and unrealistic expectations are very real issues, especially in startups. Now we’re making fun of that to make a point about how much we work?

Some Twitter users had smart stuff to say about it.

As an entrepreneur and user of LinkedIn in a tech-adjacent space, I see these faux-inspirational humblebrags all the time. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? WHAT ARE WE DOING?

I don't think we should burn LinkedIn to the ground, but it is definitely a breeding ground for this bizarre one-upsmanship, where the winner is the most sleep deprived and sees their family the least. Let's stop with this.
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​❤ Bayley

I’m kind of against the trend of calling everything a “hack” these days. (It’s almost on par with, “Dermatologists hate her because of this ONE WEIRD TRICK,” in terms of clickbait phrases that have lost all meaning.) But I really am going to talk about a simple trick/hack that’s proven to help you remember stuff and make your brain work better.

I took a lot of psychology classes in college and in almost all of them, the professor would make the same suggestion at the beginning of each semester: “Writing notes engages more areas of your brain and makes you remember the material better than typing notes. If I were you, I’d skip bringing my laptop to class.” You can read more about the research behind this here.

If that’s true for taking notes in an academic setting, you can probably apply that same insight to professional reminders and to-dos right?

I love plugging all my upcoming tasks into my phone. It’s convenient and efficient. But this week I decided to physically write things down in addition to putting them in my phone.

​This article from Mashable goes over 7 ways physical writing is supposed to help your brain. I outline my observations on trying this below:

• ​Your tasks are always visible in your workspace. I don’t have to open my phone and go to my reminders app to see what I have to do.
• Physically checking things off feels really good. Drawing a checkmark next to an item, or eventually erasing it, is super satisfying.
• You don’t waste time deciding what to do next. Everything’s already written down in a certain order. If they’re all tasks of about equal importance/urgency, you don’t waffle about what to take care of next.

I think I’ll keep with the habit of physically writing stuff down. It makes me feel like I have a better handle on everything that’s going on, and it gives me an excuse to actually use my marbled white board that I’ve only used as a photo backdrop until now.

​❤ Bayley