When I get struck by the Fear (you know – the fear that when you’re not writing, you’re wasting time; the fear that when you are writing, you’re wasting time), I need to do something practical, something physical, to fend it off. It’s similar to putting my contact lenses before making toast instead of pawing blindly through the kitchen. So I use the Pomodoro Technique [PDF], which I came across through Oliver Burkeman’s excellent Guardian series This Column Will Change Your Life. It’s the most unmiraculous way of tricking yourself into doing stuff. as a Bill Manhire simulacrum wrote here: “I am not an innovator, I will take my tricks from anywhere.” And the Pomodoro Technique is really just a slightly silly trick.
All you do is pick a task – any task, but in our case, writing, any writing – and set a timer for 25 minutes. It has to be 25 minutes. (The guy who came up with this idea in the 80s, an Italian named Francesco Cirillo, uses a kitchen timer that looks like a tomato, hence “pomodoro”.) Anyway, write until the timer rings. Stop for five minutes. Five minutes, no more, no less. Then repeat three more times. After that, you can have a longer break. Stretch, scratch, bring in the washing, or, my favourite, do a bit of vacant staring.
And, well – that’s it. This simple structuring of time creates the illusion of obligation. You must do the time. And the kitchen timer provides objective validation that you’ve done it. As Burkeman says, it’s almost embarrassing how easy it is to fool yourself. (Cirillo himself says that the first time he tried it was both helpful and humiliating.) “The ticking clock takes an internal desire to get something done and fools some part of the brain into thinking it’s external, that the clock must be obeyed,” says Burkeman. “Even the hokey language – Cirillo calls each 25-minute period a ‘pomodoro’ – helps, by making the time blocks seem like ‘things’, out in the world.” This appeals to me because before any piece of work becomes a poem, a story, a novel – at first, always, it is just a thing.
The other option, I guess, is to stop fluffing around with tomatoes and Just Do It. But setting yourself a small, specific task – something that involves the use of your limbs – is an oddly powerful way to silence the Fear. It is more manageable than making bloodless plans to “finish an essay, finish that editing job, write an application for money, write three poems”. We are so good at tricking ourselves out of doing things, we can respond with trickery to get ourselves to do them.
Ashleigh Young’s first collection of poetry, Magnificent Moon, will be launched at Unity Books, Wellington, this Thursday at 6pm. Ashleigh grew up in Te Kuiti and Wellington and has recently returned from two years in London where she was an editor at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Her poems and essays have appeared in many print and online literary magazines, including Best New Zealand Poems, Booknotes, Hue & Cry,Metro, Sport and Turbine. She won the Adam Foundation Prize in 2009 for her manuscript essay collection Can You Tolerate This?, and her essay ‘Wolf Man’ won the Landfall Essay Competition the same year. She blogs at eyelashroaming.wordpress.com.
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