Reblog

How to take a 5 minutes nap

Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Joking :) Your attention please.

The Pomodoro Technique advocates a 25 minutes of quality, focused work followed by a 5 minutes break. There are so many ways to spend the break time, but the main goal is to recharge the brain and allow for background processing of previously assimilated information. The consequence is that you shouldn’t be tempted to spend the break reading emails, news, making phone calls, or anything that generates additional pressure to the following pomodoro.

So for example looking at the above picture, I can say that looking out the window requires less effort than talking or reading emails. At the extremes there are: “sleeping” and “working”. Focused and quality work is the goal of the pomodoro, a focused and quality relax is the goal of the break. I made the mistake of thinking that just looking at email subjects or news titles was enough relaxing for a break but after comparing it with 5 minutes of deep relax I changed my mind.

Ideally, the goal of the break should be light sleep for 5 minutes. I don’t know if it’s possible to sleep, but for sure you can train yourself to do better. After a couple of weeks of self-inspection during the break and relaxing techniques I can say I’m very happy with the results. I always had bad days and those were drastically reduced by the Pomodoro Technique. But I still have bad days or half-days sometimes. I discovered that a good quality 5 mins break can give me immediately back the energy to start the next pomodoro with unexpected ease.

The problem is now how to quickly fall into deep relax. I had success with the following:

• Find a comfy chair or if you happen to have one at work, a couch
• As soon as the break starts, close your eyes and find the best relaxing position. You neck, arms and legs should be perfectly relaxed.
• Think about a light scanner (!!): a horizontal line of light starting from your head going down to your feet, very slowly. While the line of light touches all your muscles concentrate on that single area and further relax whatever is there. Especially important are the eyes: careful remove tenseness.
• Think about a white giant rectangle gently floating around. If that disappears no big deal. It’s just a starter thought to get you distracted from thinking about the goal of the previous pomodoro.
• When the break is done, gently open your eyes, start the pomodoro (or have that started automatically because you’re using my tool), focus and go.

You know that you’re doing it correctly if those 5 minutes feel like 10. All the time I failed to properly relax, I payed the consequences after 5/6 pomodoros. Something I also tried was to sleep during the 20 minutes longer breaks. That was real sleep, but never too deep to be counter-productive. Needless to say that also the long break is important as the shorter ones for a good day of pomodoros. The technique works very good in environments with low noise and familiar (where people don’t pay too much attention at you). I borrowed the idea to train the body to deeply sleep in short period of times from the polyphasic sleep model, a fascinating (and scary) way to sleep less.