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“I don’t have time to meditate.”
“I wish I could spend more time with meditation, but I am so busy.”
Any of these sound familiar? The biggest challenge most people face is finding the time to practice meditation. I used to struggle with this when I first got hooked on meditation and at the same time my life got busier with things like work, maintaining relationships, and other duties.
That’s when I came across a productivity method called the “Pomodoro Timer Method.”
It reminded me of the way I used to study in high school and university. I would spend one hour with studying, from which 45-50 minutes were dedicated to study and 10-15 minutes had to be a break, which I took really seriously and spent away from my desk doing other things, like walking, washing the dishes, doing some asanas to stretch my body, or listening to music.
The Pomodoro method is similar but a tiny bit different. The point of this method is to help you to break down your day into manageable chunks. Essentially, what you have to do is this: you focus on one task at hand, like your work for 25 minutes then you take a five-minute break (this is called a “pomodoro” session). After four pomodoros, you take a longer break for 15 minutes. It allows you more breaks than the method I worked out for myself as a teen, and frankly, when I feel fresh and I am in the flow, I still use less breaks, but this works with any tasks, especially the ones I don’t really want to do.
This also helps you to be more productive in what you’re doing because (big surprise) the human brain is not capable of multitasking. When you think you’re multitasking, you’re actually switching between tasks in a short amount of time, which makes the brain use more energy than letting your brain focus on one thing at a time properly.
If you only use a few of these pomodoro breaks to meditate, you’ll easily get 20, 30, or even more minutes out of your day that you can spend with meditation. When we start out with our meditation practice, five minutes is far more than enough in my opinion. So if you’re in a place where you can sit down in a quiet environment and just focus on your meditation, you can take out any of the five-minutes break any time of your day to sneak in a little practice.
You can do the meditation on your own and use a gentle timer on your phone to remind you that it’s time to get out of it, or there are many guided recordings on YouTube and Spotify you can follow, and plenty of apps that have five-minute meditations.
If you are more advanced in your practice or feel like you could do more with some quiet time, you can start to spend the 15-minute breaks with meditation, the same way.
There are many other benefits the Pomodoro Timer method can provide you with—additional to the benefits of meditation—like having a refreshed mind and finishing your days off with less mental fatigue and reconnecting with a positive motivation with your daily tasks and work.
And if you don’t want to spend all your breaks with meditation, you can still use them to practice mindfulness in some way or just take time off and away from your screen.
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