For this challenge (the pomodoro technique) you only need two things: a cooking timer and an hour of time. Set your alarm clock and work continuously for one hour on the most important thing you need to do that day.
Don't get distracted: turn off your notifications - if they weren't already off - pause your email and put your phone on Do Not Disturb. You'll find that you accomplish more in that one hour than the entire rest of your day.
The pomodoro technique
An important thinker behind this way of focusing, is Italian Francesco Cirillo. He is the man of the pomodoro technique. Pomodoro means tomato in Italian, but this technique has little to do with food - after all, the cooking timer with which he acquired his knowledge was shaped like a tomato.
He discovered that the ideal time to focus was 25 minutes, and decided to divide everything he needed to do into pomodoros: uninterrupted 30-minute periods. 25 minutes working on one task, five minutes break.
Don't do anything complicated in those five minutes, but give your brain time to process everything you've been doing for the past 25 minutes.
Don't give in to your impulses
The approach in a nutshell: first, write down on a paper what you want to do that day and rank by priority. Divide those tasks into pomodoros, units of half an hour. If you think you need three hours to make a presentation, write "six pomodoros. Set your alarm clock and get to work.
One important rule: a pomodoro is indivisible. Make sure you have no distractions: turn off your notifications, set your phone to do not disturb, pause your email inbox (those with Gmail can do so, for example, with Boomerang). You will find that you will then have interruptions. These can come from within yourself (if you suddenly need to go to the bathroom, or get thirsty) or externally: someone at your desk, a caller after all, or a real emergency.
In the case of internal impulses, Cirillo says: write down an apostrophe on your paper and try with even more dedication to fill your 25 minutes (because a pomodoro is indivisible). So you don't ignore your impulse, but you don't give in to it. Think of something that needs to be done acutely? Write it down under the heading "unplanned and urgent.
In case of external impulses, you tell the caller that you can call back within half an hour (after your pomodoro, that is!), put a mark on your paper, and note that again under 'unscheduled and urgent', with the appropriate deadline behind it. E-mail can always wait half an hour, and real emergencies, it turns out, actually present themselves very rarely.
When you have completed half an hour, note a cross behind your task. When you finish, you look at how many pomodoros your work took, how many interruptions you had and what was added to your to-do list. Very instructive.
