How breaking up big undertakings into smaller chunks not only increases productivity, but eases anxiety. What was once daunting, becomes manageable.

By Sam Yang - Get similar updates here

The most valuable time management tool I use in my day-to-day life is a timer. I was first introduced to the importance of a timer while working on my fitness. Instead of long durations, I found short bursts of high-intensity training not only saved me time but offered me better results. Now, this is conventional wisdom for all athletes, even endurance runners. But time management and productivity are not limited to athletics, it can be applied to work, learning, and everything else. The limits of its uses are the limits of your imagination.

You can't maintain focus for long. This is why we all joke that we have ADD even when we do not. But for most of us, it's not ADD, it's being human. Humans cannot hyperfocus for long durations. Our minds are meant for novelty, this is why we proliferated. What inventions and innovations would there be if we just stood there staring at the savanna all day? Our brains aren't wired this way, which is why when we try, we feel like we're going mad.

We have been studying the benefits of distributed practice since the 1800s. The most famous method being the Pomodoro technique. Developed by Francesco Cirillo, it's named after the Italian word for "tomato"—as a university student Cirillo used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a productivity aid. Cirillo's technique breaks work down into increments of 25 minutes followed by a short break. Just as with exercise, it's difficult to maintain intensity for long. Something will give: either you burn out or get distracted. In the case of exercise, you'll injure yourself. In the case of work, you'll increase your anxiety and stress. But with time chunking, the daunting becomes manageable.

Break Up Your Work Into Chunks

With the Pomodoro, after each round of work, you take a short break, anywhere from three to five minutes. You do this for four rounds, then you can take a longer break, 15-30 minutes. This is similar to the Tabata method for physical training where you break up short rounds of intensity with short breaks, then take a longer break after eight rounds. But the magic is in the breaks, they give your mind and body the time to download all the work you've done without overload. You're maximizing your biology.

Tweak to It Match Your Personality

However, tweak the intervals to match your personality. I find 20 minute time chunks work best for me. This was after some experimentation; you can't break up an hour into 25-minute chunks, and 30 minutes was too long. For people I've taught this to, they've either lengthened or shortened the chunks and breaks and modified the total number of rounds to fit their individual personalities.

Let Your Personality Dictate the Method

What I've learned from years of coaching martial arts is that the technique must match the personality of the user. It's not about the right technique or even the right technique for their body type. The mind supersedes the body, so the key is to find the best method for the type of mind that you have (you can also change your mindset, as I've written about previously, but what works best is somewhere in the middle). 25 minutes may be traditional, but that may not be practical for some. Some may do better with 10-minute rounds and 5-minute breaks.

I call it the personality-based method. Productivity is all about getting stuff done, and if the method doesn't match your personality, you're not going to do it. From chess masters to star athletes, half of what they do is about efficiency, but the other half is personality. If what we do doesn't express even a little bit of ourselves, again, it will drive us mad. (We need just that bit of ownership.)

Some people will abandon valuable techniques if they aren't given permission to break the rules. For example, in politics, elites smugly say that some folks vote against their economic best interests. But what's really happening is, some people value personal freedom over rigid policies. They will abandon something possibly valuable if it means too many rules. This is human, and human psychology applies to all that we do. Fortunately, personal productivity is much simpler. Just as with any innovation, no permission is needed to make changes. Do it, and if it works for you, it works for you. Find your own personal effective dosage of time. However, first learn the standard rules; the rules are the framework to build your own system upon. Only then can you forget about boilerplate figures and cookie-cutter numbers.

