focus is a really confusing topic that has a lot of different components to it and i'm sure you have already heard about something called the pomodoro technique right super super famous technique where you work for like 25 minutes and then you rest for five minutes and you repeat that cycle and it increases your focus and a lot of people have used it and found it really successful and i've used it a lot as well a lot a lot and i found it really effective but it doesn't always work and there are some limitations to it so i'm going to be talking about some other ways that you can use the pomodoro technique that actually make it even better than if you were to use it the original way so we're talking about work and rest timing and how we can use this more strategically smarter to increase our level of concentration and our depth of focus and ultimately get that bigger plate so cue the intro music welcome back to bigger plate the podcast about efficiency i'm your host dr justin sung and this is like one of my favorite topics to really talk about not because of the fact that uh i just like talking about the concept of work timers but because of the fact that we're talking about focus and focus is like such an incredibly complicated beast to think about because there are just so many things that contribute to focus right like your mood the time of the day your diet your social interaction your level of exercise the tasks that you're doing how familiar you are with it and your level of expertise um you know there's so many things that go into contributing to focus and this is a technique that increases focus through what i consider like the simplest possible way that you can increase your focus and it can actually be incredibly useful so here's the way that i recommend you to use techniques like pomodoro before i talk about pomodoro i want to talk about 5217 because 5217 is this other method of timing that you can use and there's a there's a web app and there's an android app and there might be a an ios one as well uh around 5217. it's basically the same principle except instead of working for 25 minutes you work for 52 minutes and instead of resting for five minutes you rest for 17 minutes and that might seem like very random numbers and the reason that they got these numbers is because they did this uh and by them i i'm pretty sure it's like there's a it's like it's just a company and they looked at their own employees and they just looked at how long they tend to work for and how long they risk for and which was the most optimal split i can't remember the exact details about this i actually really struggled to find the primary primary source it seems to just be an article on the company website i don't know if this was like a published paper and i actually couldn't find that but the idea is that you know you can work for a longer person and this was meant to be more optimal right and um i've used 5217 and i really like it as well i actually like it more than 25.5 because i find that 25 minutes is maybe not enough time to actually develop deep focus like you might really be getting into the swing of things and then you have to take a five minute break and it kind of pulls you out of that for a bit um whereas 5217 allows for a little bit of longer deeper work but even then that that has its flaws and so i actually use neither the pomodoro technique nor 5217 anymore i use a different technique a different strategy entirely actually which i teach in my online courses which is more flexible and more variable and more dynamic and it's actually really simple it basically says that you work for as long as you feel that you are in focus and you rest for as long as you feel that you need to regain that focus okay so seems relatively straightforward super easy right like how is this it's an entire own technique oh the reason is because number one you still need to time it but number two the amount of time that you spend aka what you deem in focus and out of focus changes and what you do during your break changes as well and so there are a lot of sort of moving components i'll break it down from the very very beginning so let's say that you're sitting down ready to do some work first things first when's your next hard break so for example let's say that you're sitting down and you know that you've got an event or a lecture or like a meeting or something coming up in the next hour okay great you've got one hour that's your hard limit and if you've got lots of time then you basically don't even need to think about this right if you've got more than let's say three hours i'd say don't you don't have to think about this too much but if it's like an hour an hour and a half or so keep that in mind the next thing is that you want to start blocking out the tasks that and intentions that you want to do and you want to get get done so if you're studying how much do you want to study if there's a particular piece of work that you want to get done what is the work set clear boundaries and distinctions and goals and intentions for what you want to achieve by the time you hit your hard limit and be generous uh generous meaning like be conservative rather you know don't don't set yourself like an ultra ambitious goal what i like to do is i like to set myself a definite goal and i like to set myself a stretch goal so if i hit my definite goal i'm still happy i've hit my stretch goal i'm even happier but i'm still satisfied to have had only my initial original first goal then split up that goal into multiple different task blocks so this is where that hard limit is necessary so if you've only got one hour to look at something and you're looking at it for you know you're working on it only for that hour or hour and a half and your goal is to do like a certain you know activity and that activity in itself probably is going to take you like an hour there's not really necessarily any point splitting it up any further because that is the block and that's the amount of time that you have so it's really just about setting yourself a deadline and just trying to get it out as quickly as possible if you've got more time like three hours and you've got multiple different tasks one of them might take 20 minutes one of them might take 30 minutes the other one may take an hour another one may take two hours you want to be able to break those up so you're just setting a shorter term measure and you want to if it's possible set those short-term measures and blocks of 30 minutes to an hour or so roughly and that just means that your brain can be more focused on each individual block at any given time it just helps to hack into parts of your innate psychology that give it a sense of urgency that drives that focus deeper and deeper once you've done that this is where it becomes a little bit trickier so you're going to set yourself that task you're going to start you know you're going to obviously start doing the task you're going to be really mindful of how long it takes for you or you're going to calibrate yourself to when you start dipping down in terms of that focus curve so when you first start something your level of focus is okay and then it should relatively quickly go up when if you're in a distraction-free environment all of the other things about focus that are going to be necessary we're not we're not going to talk about that if you've got a good environment you've got a good mentality and all that stuff is going well then you should enter into a focused state relatively soon and you're kind of executing on the task and imagine you're focused like a knife like a really really sharp knife so when you use a knife it's really sharp initially but it doesn't maintain that sharp edge for really too long okay and this is why i like professional shifts like you sharpen your knife you like every single day or even multiple times a day because that edge you can if the more you use it the more you lose it so when you've got that edge you're really really sharp and highly efficient you know your focus is maximum so your efficiency is really really high you're able to finish tasks very quickly after a while you'll start noticing that you're really trying to cut with a dull blade now you know and it really does feel like kind of smashing through a tomato with a dull knife it's like it is technically working but it's not a pleasant experience and you're kind of you're making errors and you're making mistakes and you're like how was i thinking about again and you're spending more time now trying to like recover focus rather than getting the stuff done that is the moment that you should rest that's the moment that you should rest and this is much earlier than most people will rest most people will rest when they notice that they're feeling tired and i equate this kind of like dehydration like by the time your lips are dry and cracking and like you feel super dry and dehydrated you probably should have drunk water already before that you know you should feel you should drink water when you start feeling i'm a little dehydrated like i'm a little thirsty now you should start drinking water then you shouldn't wait until like your lips and skin are cracking cracking yeah but that's how people handle work because they like they push themselves to their limit and then they take a break or you know maybe not to that extreme but you know they take a break much later than they need to and what this does is that it increases the amount of time it takes for you to recover because the recovery phase is usually longer than the time uh the long longer the more you need to recover so there's this uh quite famous like story even it's actually so widely distributed i don't think anyone knows who originally said it people think that was a psychologist but the idea goes that there was a psychologist in a room and uh she has a glass in her hand which is half full of water and then she holds it up and everyone in the room thinks that she's gonna say is this glass half full or half empty of water you know the typical thing but what she says is that it doesn't matter whether the glass is half full or half empty what matters is how long you've been holding the glass up for and that no matter how long how how um you know full or empty the glass is if you hold it up for long enough the glass could be damn near empty your arm's gonna get tired eventually and you're gonna need to put that glass down and if you hold it for as long as you possibly can can you might just end up dropping that glass and breaking it so it's better to put the glass down when you start noticing that your arm's getting a little bit tired because you might hold it up for let's say five minutes and then your arm's like okay my arm's going to get tired you put it down for like two minutes and then you can pick it up again for another five minutes and down for two minutes and you pick it up for four minutes and down and then up for three and a half and down and you know you can see that the overall amount of time that you can hold the glass for is actually pretty decent but let's say that you hold the glass now for 15 minutes non-stop and then your arm is killing you and you put your arm down your arm's going to be sore for the rest of the day you held that glass for 15 minutes whereas the other person that took regular early breaks was able to hold their glass up for an hour you know cumulatively and they're not going to be wasted for the entire day so this is the thing is it's more about that consistency and when we look at getting work done we don't want to have a really highly productive first two hours of the day and then the horrible rest of the week because we just burnt ourselves out and used up all of our focused resources in the first you know a couple hours of doing work we want to spread that out we want to have high intensity highly focused and highly efficient work done consistently throughout the week and as you get more and more tired which will still happen your efficiency will drop but we want to if that if there's a curve of declining efficiency and focus we want to flatten that curve as much as possible we want to make it so that we stay at the higher levels of focus for longer which means taking breaks much earlier than we would normally take them so let's say that you were working in deep focus and 45 minutes in you notice that you're starting to like you know lose that edge it's getting a bit blunter you're spending a little bit of time like asking yourself hey what was i thinking about what was i meant to be doing next you know you're getting into that mentality that's a good time to take a break take the break then now look at how long that you have been focused for in this example it was 45 minutes but let's say that you're super tired or you're just having an off day where your focus is not super great that might only be 10 minutes that might only be five minutes it doesn't really matter okay just or you might have had a great day might have been two hours whatever it is look at the amount of time that you were focused for take that amount of time and then now make a decision am i going to be focused after my break do i want to be focused after my break or do i not really care what's happening after my break so the latter example might be like in the evening there was some work you needed to get done you get the work done it's been some time you feel like you've gotten a good amount of work done you're gonna take a break and you think okay after my break i i'll try to get a bit more work done but you're not really too bothered right then you can just go and relax and just do whatever you want if you are going to be focused after that though like you after this break you need to get back into work and you want to stay focused then during the break you want to use it more productively and there are two ways that you can use this break and that depends on how tired you are so early in the day you might already have a lot of energy and resources available to use so you might not be that tired you're taking an early break but you feel like you could have kept going and you should feel like you could have kept going because that was the whole point remember so you might feel like you could keep going and you want you know you need to take a break just to make sure that you're optimized for the entire day or week rather than just for that you know first couple hours which is good but you still want to maintain that flow state what you do during your break is you use it productively you have a productive break so during this 15-minute break sorry so however long so let's say that you took a 45 you work for 45 minutes take that time and divide it by three or four okay divide it by three or four and it this is going to be up to you to calibrate mostly so let's just say that we're dividing it by three so you work for 45 minutes okay you're going to take a 15 minute break and in that 15 minutes you're going to use that time productively you might get some miscellaneous life admin tasks done things that just kind of keep you in flow like organize things or send off some emails or whatever it is but the most important thing is that you're not stressing about it whatever you do during that break don't do anything that's going to really stress you out if there's an email that's like waiting for you and you're like oh god like reading the email is going to stress me the hell out and derail my day don't look at it okay that's like a task in itself you want to just do those little random miscellaneous things that are just sitting there lying there that you can just mop up really really quickly that doesn't take any effort things that you can almost just like mindlessly do that gets your mind or like mindfully do that keeps you occupied and feels like you're maintaining flow if you don't have those tasks or you don't feel like doing that another way that you can spend this time productively is to actually think on a different level okay and what i mean is um if you were if you spent your entire time doing something that was reasonably like execution based like pretty task oriented like getting things done procedurally like you were writing things down or you were or you were typing something or you're um you're organizing or planning when you were like studying then spend some time thinking about it at a higher level so if you were studying go for a stroll go for a walk around your room even or whatever you know just and in your mind just like casually play with the ideas of what you've looked about you know see the forest instead of the trees you know instead of looking at every individual thing that you've studied look now at how it all fits to the big picture and just kind of try to connect the ideas together and look for you know different interesting ways that you can apply this knowledge you know think about it at a higher level not only is it going to be incredibly beneficial for your learning but it's also going to be incredibly good for your focus and productivity and maintaining that flow state if you're working and you you just organized a bunch of stuff and you did some planning or there was like a report that you had to write up then think about your work at a higher level now think okay like where is this leading me towards or like okay generally speaking in the entire flow of my week how does that report kind of contribute how is my next kind of task gonna sink into that you can maybe do a slight micro reprioritization you can think about your life in general like okay like think about how your work and productivity is going to relate to your hobbies or time spent doing other things give yourself a different way of thinking about it go for a stroll you know refreshing your eyes and then use that time to stay in a flow state but not doing the type of work that you were doing before which is going to exhaust you if you are really tired then you don't want to do something that's going to maintain your flow state because it's just going to use up precious energy and it's not going to be worth it what you want to do now is use something called active relaxation and active relaxation is exactly what it sounds like you are deliberately doing an activity that helps you actually relax and this does not mean go and consume absolutely a ton of alcohol that's the opposite do something like mindfulness meditation and if you are you know like over i would say like 25 years old and you are still thinking about meditation as like oh that's like some bs stuff like happy that it's not for me you need to grow up man like do some research so mindfulness meditation and meditation in general is like one of the most beneficial things that you can do for your mind it's like going to the gym for your mind if your gym also felt as relaxing as going to a spa or getting a massage you know it's like it's like a brokenly effective and powerful tool to use and almost almost not always not always but almost every single time i see or hear someone who says that they really struggle or don't find meditation useful they're the people that need it the most right it's kind of like i really struggle to lift this weight at the gym could it mean that you're not strong enough or could it mean that the gym is somehow magically not suited for you right it's kind of the same thing as like if you really struggle to maintain a meditative state and and meditate for even like five or ten minutes then could there be an issue with your ability to inherently control the way that you think regulate your mind regulate your thoughts and emotions and then maintain center and focus probably going to be the case so at least that's what the research would suggest right so doing something like active meditation 10 minutes of meditation can give you more restoration and recovery than an hour or two hours or an entire day of you know mindless time span where at the end of the day you're still exhausted despite not having done anything okay so i would recommend you use that time for active relaxation so here's the breakdown again you figure out when your hard time limit is if the time limit is too short you don't really have to worry about this because you don't have much time anyway if you've got a long time limit you break that down into shorter term goals you focus on the goal and you get it done and then you try to immerse yourself in the focus and you put a timer on yourself as soon as you feel yourself going blunt stop the timer look at how long you're focused for divide that by three or four i recommend you start with three and if it's too long you can bring it down divide that by three and that's your time for relaxation think do i need to focus after this or not if you don't need a focus just do whatever if you do need to focus use it productively and then ask yourself am i tired or am i not if you're tired do active relaxation like meditation if you are not tired then do something else that maintains that flow state like different levels of thinking or just casual mind mapping or um you know something else that's productive like cleaning the house or something that's not gonna stress you out and then you can get back into things and enter into flow state again the next time you enter into that focus zone let's say you took a 15 minute break the next time you get into it you may only maintain focus now for instance 45 minutes you might only maintain focus for 37 minutes but that's okay so you do 37 minutes and then you take a break but now your break is a little bit shorter so instead of a 15 minute break you might take a 12 minute break okay and then you focus again and now you focus for 26 minutes and then you take a a nine minute break right so your level your break time and your focus time is changing constantly based on the optimum amount of time that is best for you and this is the difference between something like pomodoro and 5217 which are rigid and if you really think about how multi-factorial focus is and that focus and concentration is it just does not make sense like just really try to explain to yourself how it is that arbitrarily 25.5 which by the way is literally based on the fact that that's the a tomato cooking timer that the dude had in his dorm room when he created the pomodoro technique it was as arbitrary as that like if you had an egg timer it might have looked completely different and so if you think about it from that point of view like it just doesn't make sense that somehow 25 5 is a magical split that just makes you more efficient rather it's the fact that you're on the clock and you're taking early frequent breaks and you set yourself short-term goals and you work with intensity so when you apply those same principles and now let the times vary dynamically based on your present level of focus at any given time and for any given day and for any given task that means that the amount of time you work for the amount of rest you have is optimized always for the maximum level of focus that you can achieve and this is another incredibly effective way of making sure that you can really execute a lot of stuff get a lot of those tasks done very very quickly if something you think is going to take an hour most of the time we're used to it taking longer than however long we thought it was going to take this is the way that we can increase our focus so that takes less time than we than we thought it was going to take and that's going to allow us to free up more time for our other priorities like we talked about in the previous episode right so it all goes hand in hand the common issues that i see people um doing is that they just don't fall like they literally just don't follow this like straight up okay the most common reason that people aren't able to use this technique is they literally just don't use the technique it's like i'm not saying this just for funsies right like actually use the technique the way that it's sort of prescribed to you it's very flexible it's very dynamic a lot of the students that i work with especially especially the younger students who just like haven't experienced enough of life to realize that it's important to stay optimum and take care of yourself they just work like endlessly and then i'll ask them hey did you take a break when you felt like you were losing your edge or did you take a break when you felt like you're already too tired most of the time they're like oh yeah i kind of took a break when i was too tired it's like well you did it wrong then right you need to take the break when you feel like you're losing your edge did you take a break for you know a third to a quarter of the time that you're focusing for they'll say oh no i took a longer break or i took a shorter break or did you use that break the way that you were meant to it's like oh no i just kind of like just bummed around for a bit it's like you have to actually follow each step the way that it's meant to be followed and if you do if you do apply it that way to to date at least i haven't met someone where it didn't work for ever but i have met plenty of people who didn't follow the technique so i can't even talk more about like the common issues people face because like the only issue is that people just didn't use it so you listening now if you want to increase the efficiency at which you're able to focus on an activity and get stuff done give this a go apply it as it is see how you find it and let me know let me know so there because it might be other issues that i've just never heard of before that i'll be able to help you work through leave a comment on youtube facebook instagram about this technique get in touch with me and you know let me know which issues that you have and we can have a a conversation about that if you're listening to me on the podcast thanks for listening if you're listening on youtube make sure to leave a like leave a comment it helps with the algorithm i'll see you in the next episode and until then stay efficient [Music] you