If you haven’t already, definitely read Paul Graham’s legendary “Maker vs Manager Schedule” essay: Read this fantastic article by James Clear on how to think about your average speed in all areas of life: Your “average speed” and not your peak speed is what matters. Like many things in life, the PhD is a marathon not a sprint. This might not be as important of a feature for other people. The tomatoes resetting at midnight was important for me because otherwise I would inevitably switch to a nocturnal schedule. Especially when writing, it is easy to let time pass by without actually writing words on the page. When writing my thesis, I would record the word count I achieved during each tomato. Sometimes I wrote detailed descriptions of what I did during each tomato and sometimes I didn’t. Let me know what you think of the Tomato Method! How did it work for you? What methods do you use to keep yourself accountable? When you reach your goal for the day, record it on a calendar Pick the right tomato goal (picking a number that is too high will make the method unsustainable)Ģ. When you use the Tomato Method, make sure to:ġ. When there are too many weeks in a row where you haven’t achieved your tomato goal, it’s a sign you might not be focusing on the “important but not urgent” work and may need to make a change to your life. Set a low tomato count per day (3-5 tomatoes) and do them first thing in the morning.Institute one “no meeting day” per week and use the Tomato Method to add structure and accountability to your “free” day.If your life consists of a lot of meetings or classes, but you still want to get deep (important, non-urgent ) work done… it alerted me to when I had gone into the black hole of reading papers to find the answer to an insignificant question.) Writing what you’ve accomplished at the end of each 25-minutes also keeps you aware of when you are spending too long on certain tasks (i.e. What matters is the consistency with which you achieve your tomato goal, not the absolute number of tomatoes. Use the Tomato Method every day and track the days you achieve your tomato goal on a calendar.If you are a PhD student or are building a startup or have other work with few external deadlines… About 2 hours of true focused work per day is honestly more than most people achieve. If you have multiple meetings or classes per day, 4-5 tomatoes might be reasonable. to finish a thesis or prepare for an upcoming conference).Ī reasonable work-load if you’re on a maker-schedule is 10 tomatoes per day. I would not recommend 16 tomatoes per day unless you need to be pushing really hard (i.e. Doing 7 hours (16 tomatoes) of focused deep work usually took the whole day to accomplish. Researchers have estimated that out of a standard 8-hour workday, most people only actually do real work for 3 hours. The key is setting the right tomato goal.ġ6 tomatoes per day is a ruthless schedule. There were other days where the tomatoes flew by. I could barely sit through one 25-minute session. There were days where each tomato was excruciatingly painful. “Do I have time to go get coffee with my colleagues? ” I have 2.5 hours before I need to leave the office and just 3 more tomatoes left. ![]() If I go to the talk, I won’t be able to finish my tomatoes. “Do I have time to go this cool talk? ” Well it’s 7pm and I still have 10 more tomatoes to do before midnight. Setting a target tomato goal helped me focus my day when there was no other structure. After the deadline, I would be exhausted and un-motivated and the cycle would repeat. Then a deadline would approach and I pulled all-nighters to meet it. I would sit in lab and do emails or other non-important work, and, consequently, not accomplish much real research. Imagine waking up every day for 5+ years and needing to decide what to do, when to do it, how to do it… and then making sure you do it.Īt the beginning of my PhD, I relied of inspiration. The hardest thing about a PhD is knowing how much to work and keeping yourself accountable to that schedule. ![]() ![]() Sometimes I did not count meetings as work. I usually counted research meetings as 1 tomato regardless of how long the meeting took.I usually did not count emails as work, except in rare cases where I had a pile-up of emails that I absolutely needed to respond to and had been avoiding.The tomato count for the day resets at midnight so you must get all your tomatoes done before midnight.I almost always skipped the 5-min breaks and just refreshed the page to start a new tomato.If you get distracted or interrupted for whatever reason, you must “squash” the tomato and start over. Most people are surprised by how often these little interruptions come when they start tracking it. The golden rule of the “Tomato Method” is that the 25-minutes must consist of pure work.
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