Why I Stopped Working 8 Hours a Day and Learnt to Love Productivity

I started using the Pomodoro technique last year when the pandemic hit and the kids stayed at home to study, and it’s the best thing to ever happen to me.

I’ve been working on my own and for myself for over 17 years now. I’ve had a very satisfactory work life – all my business has been a result of word-of-mouth, and there’s rarely been a fallow period.

But because it’s come that easy, I’ve never treated it like a business. I’ve never really engaged in marketing my services (bar a couple of times early on), never really needed to go hunting for clients, and never planned ahead. This last part is important – I hate planning. I’m a two-week-horizon kind of gal.

And so, when work comes that easy, and you’re good at what you do (sure, I’ll toot my own horn), it sort of all just flows. One job comes in, I take as long as I need to work on it, send it back, and then something else comes in. I was never really late because I gave myself relaxed margins, and since I was quoting my clients a flat fee per project, I didn’t need to know exactly how many hours I was putting in.

PANDEMICS, POMODOROS, AND PRODUCTIVITY

But when the pandemic hit, and the kids were at home, and my husband too, we had to come up with a plan as to how to work and take care of the kids. We decided that I would work mornings, and he would work afternoons and evenings (since he had more work to do than I did). That meant I was able to work from 9 to about 12. Approximately 3 hours. I had to get all my work for the day done in three hours.

Ok. I started. But I quickly found myself floundering. The work we writers and editors do is so intensely mentally taxing that I just couldn’t keep it up for the three hours. I started off well enough, but about 50 mins in, I would stop and take a break, and the break could last for any length of time, and then I would work again in fits and starts, but nothing with quite the intensity of that first sprint, and always with that looming sense of “I have so much to do and I don’t know when it will end”.

That’s when my husband urged me to use the Pomodoro technique. The pomodoro technique is quite simple, but HUGELY effective – you work in timed bursts of 25 minutes, after which it’s pens down, a 5 minute break, and then back to work for another 25 minutes. After about 3 sprints, you can take a slightly longer break of 15 minutes.

I used an app called Be Focused (Pro version) for the pomodoros (available for iOS and mac at US$4.99), because it allowed me to name my sprints, and I used the name of the project I was working on. I could then chart, over time, how much time I had actually spent on working for that project.

POMODORO AS MY GURU

What this process of working did for me is:

1. It made me very aware of exactly how much time I was putting into each project, which means I could now tell you how much time any kind of work—editing, writing, invoicing, emailing, coming up with work maps for clients—would require (essential for planning!)

2. It made me work with vigour and concentration, right through the day! Pre-pomodoro, I believed that my work should stretch out over an 8-hour workday, and so I worked at leisure, at my own pace, in bits and pieces, making the whole thing last 8 hours, at the end of which I was exhausted and fed up with working. Now, though, knowing that I had only 25 minutes to produce something tangible, I got right down to work.

3. I learnt to take TIMED breaks, which were absolutely crucial in keeping that mental vigour and vitality through my work hours (remember, writing and editing is very mentally taxing!). And during these breaks, I DID NOT stay on a screen. I would use the 5 minutes or longer to go to the bathroom, get a glass of water, check on my kids or other things in the home. It was important to stay away from the screen so that I could recuperate from screen exhaustion and give my brain a real break.

4. It made me realise that I didn’t need to work a full 8 hours (and that I hadn’t, in fact, been working a full 8 hours – mentally too taxing). I could get away with 4 to 5 hours of intense work and be MORE productive than I was before.

5. Once I started understanding how much time this amorphous activity of academic editing took, I realised that I did in fact have time to do other things, like start a writing community for women in academia, begin to offer workshops, and offer writing coaching to clients. All of these new activities were added on to my editing work, and now I could see the seeds of a business.

6. Eventually, I made more money last year than in any other year I’ve been working (not by far, just more), even compared to pre-kids when I had all the time I needed. In fact, that showed me very clearly that it wasn’t a question of having time, it was a question of managing time – something I had always hated doing, deep down in my super liberal, literature-loving, business-hating guts.

Now that I am more of a planner than ever before, and I am working well and remaining fresh at the end of my workday (the yoga is helping too), the next step is how to work with goals. Oh gawd. If my 19-year-old self heard that, I’d be classified as the sell-out. But then again, my 19-year-old self did not have to tend to two kids and an impending “retirement”.