Pomodoro timers + peanut butter cups
- Work on a single task for 25 minutes
- Take a five minute break
- Rinse and repeat as necessary
- Sometimes break for 30 minutes (like, lunch, and stuff?)
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| A screenshot of my timer clicking away |
While I always get my work done — no matter what the cost — I COULD DEFINITELY be doing it more efficiently by focusing on one thing at a time.
Also, by not looping “non-work” into “work” because it feels like multi-tasking but really I’m just flaking off. When your job is essentially being on the internet, this is tricky.
My biggest time-sucks while I’m working, as I’ve talked about before, are …
- Email (Sometimes they are really timely and require action! Also I’m completely addicted to #InboxZero so I’ve been fixated on keeping it empty)
- Facebook (I’m lonely! I work at home!)
- Twitter (It’s for work! It’s a networking tool!)
- US Weekly (It’s an addiction. CANTSTOPWONTSTOP.)
- Blogs (Also for work. They’re my people.)
- Pinterest (Yet again, for work. See?)
So I started using the Pomodoro timer, and … I really like it.
It does an old-timey tick-tick-tick as you’re working, and I chose the sound of a bustling coffee shop for my break time sound. There’s a little ding (you know I customized it) that tells you when it’s time to resume working, and … I just like it.
When the five minutes of break-time starts, I jump out of my chair and spend it standing to stretch my legs. I might putter around my office and try to clean up the mounds of fabric and pattern pieces, or cut out a pattern, or run upstairs to grab a snack. It feels so justified, because it’s A REAL BREAK. Like REAL PROFESSIONALS might have at a REAL OFFICE.
The 25-minute work segments have been great because the tick-tick-tick sound reminds me to focus on completing ONE task (or most of one) and not bopping all over the internet because I was looking up a word on Thesaurus.com and wound up on a slideshow about Things I Never Knew About the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
It’s been the kick in the ass I need to NOT have a million tabs on the go, and just FOCUS on one thing while ignoring the other things I could be doing. Twenty-five minutes is not a long time, but it’s a REALLY long time if you stay on task.
Anecdote time!
I really noticed this the other day when I was practically slumped over at my desk eating the mini Reese cups (post-Halloween addiction). I felt like I was in a fog and it was imposssssssible to work.
But I turned on my timer, opened up the story I needed to write, and slogged into it with gritted teeth. I wrote solidly for that 25 minutes and got the entire thing almost finished. When the timer dinged for my break, I turned it off and went outside (for what ended up being close to 30 minutes) before dinner.
Normally, I would have spent the full hour chugging away at the story and opening a zillion other tabs. So … thanks, little tomato friend!
I’ll keep you posted on how the Pomodoro timer works for me as I keep using it, but so far it’s a keeper. Also, I’m out of mini peanut butter cups and that’s probably a good thing. They were bringing me down.
xo
NOTE: This post was not sponsored or endorsed by Pomodoro (or Reese) in any way. But feel free to send those tiny peanut butter cups. I lied when I said I quit them.
Finding the time (for me)
There wasn’t time in my schedule to think, to plan, to daydream. Every minute of the day was scheduled for maximum efficiency. The only time ideas trickled into my thoughts was when I was trying to sleep, and I’d force myself to clear my mind in order to get the sleep I needed.
Since September, life had been moving in fast-forward. Suddenly having a child in elementary school intensified our family’s schedule, and I felt like I was permanently on the dead run.
Rushing to get everyone dressed, washed, brushed, combed. Rushing to get breakfast into them and finalize the school lunch. Rushing to get to the bus stop in time. All while checking my phone (a.k.a. my watch, my calendar, my survival device) every couple of minutes to make sure we’re meeting our morning “milestones.”
Were we all downstairs, fully dressed and ready, by 7 a.m.? Check. Were the kids finished breakfast and getting into their outerwear at 7:20 a.m.? Check. Were we walking out the door at 7:25 a.m.? Check. My project management background made our lives incredibly efficient but I was paying the price every time my throat tightened …
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
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| Hint: one of my absolute favourite books, The Fringe Hours, is about to come into play … |
Windsor chair makeover
Believe it or not, this was a project three years in the making — and the results aren’t even that impressive!
A family friend gifted us their old dining room table, chairs and hutch when we moved into our house four years ago. It was a huge upgrade from the patio-esque glass and iron table we’d used in our Bedford condo, and the table came with two leaves so we could extend it for company. We were thrilled! The trouble was … there were only four chairs.
My sister-in-law offered us the old Windsor chairs she was storing in her basement, and we gladly accepted. After all, chairs are chairs, right? Oh wait — they’re forest green? *gulp*
And thus began a three-year journey to bringing the chairs to a point of acceptance.
The first step was taking a good, long look at these chairs and deciding what to do about their forest green-ness. It had to go — but how? Did we sand down to the bare wood and restain them to match the table? I would have done that now, but we were early in our DIY career. Did we scratch the blue and white colour scheme on our main level and embrace forest green and dusty rose like it was 1993 again? Um, no, not that last one.
We decided painting only the legs and spindles would be the easiest option, but oh, do I wish we could go back in time and warn ourselves, Back to the Future style.
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Six lunch hacks for busy parents
I microwaved a burger at 7 a.m. and it ended up taking over half my day.
Yes, that’s true.
I was testing a new lunch idea (item #2) and it worked so brilliantly that I thought: “Hey, self. You should take some poorly-lit photos of this on your iPhone and make a round-up post with different lunch ideas.”
So I spent too much time working on this post (you’re welcome) and now it’s ready.
Some of these tips are for sending lunches to school, others are for eating at home (kids + parents), all are possibly ridiculous but they are STUFF I DO. HERE IN THIS HOUSE. WHERE I MAKE A LOT OF LUNCHES.
Ready? Set? Go! My six current-favourite lunch hacks:
1. Pack a puck.
Our five-year-old son wasn’t crazy about the idea of eating “lunch foods” (like, uh, sandwiches?) every single school day. He’s an odd duck sometimes, but we love that.
We’ve only sent D to school with a sandwich maaaaaybe five times so far. He does enjoy WowButter (thank God) with strawberry jam, but he’s just more of a “dinner” kid who would rather have leftovers from last night’s dinner … you know, providing he enjoyed the dinner, which mostly he does.
So I started freezing little portions of our dinners (like pasta and chicken divan) in muffin tins or bowls, storing them in bags in the freezer, and thawing a portion in the microwave each morning so I could dump it into his thermos.
Lunch pucks! Lifesavers, honestly. More details here.
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| Easy frozen school lunches |
2. Skip the sandwich.
As you guys know, we do BBQ Thursday every week (have been for almost three years, actually), which is often barbecued sausages or burgers or something like that. D LOVES hamburgers and calls himself the Hamburger King, so he always wanted to take a burger but I didn’t know how to manage it.
Well! I gave it whirl this very morning* for the good of my readers (and, uh, D of course). I heated up a burger in the microwave, cut it down to fit the impossibly tiny hamburger buns I’d baked the day before (not sure what happened there, but there was a rising issue).
I also cut a cheese slice, because I couldn’t resist the cuteness. I added ketchup, assembled it all, and wrapped it in foil while it was still hot. Perfect for popping into the thermos without it falling apart, and D reported it was delicious. #winning
*Yes, we had BBQ Thursday on a Wednesday this week due to Meat Expiry Date Drama and no, I’m not over it yet.
Other non-puck and non-sandwich-y things we’ve packed for school? Whole-wheat tortilla chips with a container of salsa. Pepperoni with cheese slices and crackers. Pizza slices. Rolls. English muffin pizzas.
Back when I was doing Weight Watchers after having C, I was really good about pre-making parts of my lunch so it was easier to eat well. I had a toddler and a baby at the time, so making nice little meals for myself was … just not a huge priority.
Sometimes I’ll cook up a pound of lean beef with lots of peppers, tomatoes, spices, salsa, etc. and portion it into six plastic containers. It’s easy to grab one, heat it up, dump it on a salad or throw it into a tortilla.
I do the same thing sometimes with cooked boneless chicken, veggies, and cheese. Then I can use the mixture for a quick wrap, quesadilla, taco, salad, etc. Can you tell I REALLY like Mexican food?
5. Liven up your leftovers.
I have admitted before that Darling Husband and I used to be terrible about wasting food — er, back in our pre-children days when we were rolling in disposable income as two DINKs (Double Income No Kids) and eating in restaurants whenever we flingin’ flangin’ felt like it, damnit.
I learned that I am really grossed out by unappealing leftovers (also toilets of all kinds, but that’s a bizarre phobia, uh, story for another day). So I never stick a half-full casserole dish or pot or something in the fridge (it would make me retch).
I can’t eat leftovers for lunch until I’ve prettied them up by either packaging them nicely (so they look like a new meal) or combining them in a way that looks nice. Sometimes this allows you to make a meal from NOTHING, and it saves the day.
Very old post here, but excuse the terrible flipphone-esque photos from the blogging Dark Ages.
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| Terrible photo I took a zillion years ago when the blog was a baby and I think I may have had a fliphone (or a really awful BlackBerry, IDK?) |
We are now HUGE leftover-eaters, and we pretty rarely scrape much straight from the fridge into the compost bin. Our lunches are often just leftovers from the previous night, but if there isn’t enough to go around, I’ll make one of these cute muffin tin lunches using a bit of this and a bit of that.
(I used paper cups that we’d been given for this one to mix things up, and the kids lovedddd it. A different spoon for each item? HECK YES, I DON’T EVEN CARE WHAT’S IN THE CUPS. It was like eating six different Costco samples for lunch!)
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