I’ve alluded to my search for personal organization a couple of times during 2009. While it’s not something that I’m obsessing about, I now capture my major goals in Things, and that at least tells me what I’m supposed to be doing in terms of short and long-term goals. However, I found that sometimes I couldn’t figure out how to organize a single day in my calendar, simply because I would jump around to all sorts of projects and never get even one of them accomplished.

Back in August, fellow TUAW blogger Brett Terpstra started writing a post about The Pomodoro Technique[TM]. Being a foodie and part Italian, I knew that pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, so I asked Brett if he was talking about cooking. What he turned me on to was a wonderful concentration and organization technique.

In 1992, a student by the name of Francesco Cirillo was looking for a way of improving his study habits. He took a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (hence the name Pomodoro) and found that if he broke tasks into 25-minute sessions, now known as Pomodoros, followed by a 5-minute break, and then took a longer 15-minute break after four Pomodoros, he was able to concentrate more fully on the tasks at hand and accomplish more work.