Simple Rituals that Make Time for Deeper Thinking

I often hear from students, readers and clients that they don’t have time to think. Bombarded with requests, overloaded with tasks and trying to adapt to a dynamic and stressful environment leaves no time for deep thinking.  When trying to work on bigger tasks that require significant thought they do so for a short time before they get interrupted, start to worry about something else or just slip into brain fog.

Simple rituals are one of the best ways to increase the duration of your mental focus and concentration. The key is to keep it simple and practice it regularly.

An example is the Pomodoro Technique. To make it work you:

1.   Select a task to work on

2.  Set a timer for 25 minutes

3.  Work on just that task until the timer goes off

4.  Rest for 5 minutes

Afterwards you can either stop, go back to step 1 and pick a new task or continue to cycle through the steps on the first task until the work is done.

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The person that developed the technique, Francesco Cirillo, is Italian and used a kitchen timer that looked like a tomato.  This may seem too simple to work but it does. The timer is critical as it creates the conditions that allow us to escape into the task at hand.

For more information on the Pomodoro technique check out the video on the Lifehacker blog. You can get a free e-book and purchase supporting materials directly from Francesco Cirillo and the Pomodoro team.

Of course there are many other simple rituals that achieve the same thing. Interested to hear from readers about the techniques they use to make time for deep thinking.