A couple of years ago I came across a special notebook. It is not a notebook of the normal fashion but more a combination of a notebook and a calendar. The reason I got interested in it was that I wanted a tool that helped me focus more on the important things. It was, and is, too easy to get caught up with “being busy being busy” - getting things done but not the important ones.

Pomodoro means Tomato in Italian. The Pomodoro Technique is a way to eat raw tomatoes without getting tomato juice and seeds on your checks… no, just kidding. The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity technique that helps with focusing on different tasks at hand. The inventor of the technique, Francesco Cirillio, gave it the name when he used a simple tomato shaped kitchen timer to measure distinct time boxes for work and pause.

I am writing the draft of this blog post as I am travelling out of Amsterdam and the Netherlands after spending a couple of days here to meet a few of the worlds most productive people. Here I attended the GTD Summit which was also my first event related to GTD. It is 10 years ago since the last summit was held and this is most likely the last that will happen with David Allen, the writer of the book Getting Things Done, still at the helm.  

As you may know by reading post from this blog, I am a bit nerdy. When I was in my early 20ies I was on the verge of hitting the famous wall. I had a ridiculous stressful situation and I continuously dropped the ball. To make things worse there where also a lot of things out of my control that I needed to keep track of but did not really have the tools to do so. Too much stuff to do and no way to be able to focus and get things completed. At this point in my life I found a productivity methodology called Getting Things Done (offical page here). This became the tool that helped me to get my life sorted out and it stopped me from going crazy. Every since this time I have been an avid GTD:er.