Check it out, my first Unsplash insert. I'm really Hackernoon worthy now!
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo[1] in the late 1980s.[2] The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro, from the Italian word for 'tomato', after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student.[3][4]
Hey this whole time I thought the technique was Japanese. Is it Italian? Guys, they made the trains run on time. S/HE NAMED IT AFTER FOOD. Is Italian, indeed. I'ma invent something Earth-shattering one day and name it 'Italian Stallion' to celebrate my Italian brother.
Anywho, regardless of nationalism and all it's trappings Pomodora is Earth-shattering. It's an idea that to be productive you should take little mini-breaks throughout the day.
I've mastered it through soul-sucking bank-crushing and literally, very deadly poison inhaled into my lungs.
I need it about once every 20-30 minutes, it takes 5 minutes, and my (also just as Italian, also just as badass) sister says I should replace that with a healthier habit - she's probably right, and she's been giving people the same advice professionally along with a whole lot of individual hells for a long, long time. She's started her own clinic partly in defiance partly sick of the system and The Man.
My brother's a far better software architect than I am at anything to do with computers, and the man might not even believe in 'breaks' as most of us do.
I'm diverging away from my original point: some of the best things come of our worst habits.
Back to a much better point: my family is kinda awesome. Almost all of them graduated from a school not far from here where my grandfather met my grandmother when they played in something like 1934, but I know for a fact it was Shakespeare's Hamlet. She was also Juliet and he Romeo, but they met as Hamlet and Ophelia. Although maybe not Ophelia. Definitely Juliet.
My uncle, without telling anyone, started a bursary at that school for people studying sciences to save the world in he and his wife's name. My other uncle wrote a novel set in the future that literally puts the entire geographical area of that school on a pedestal, while in jest saying 'I hope Acadia shares not the fate of the Acadie' in the forward.
Or something like that.
I owe everything to my family. I got my first big break in tech when that brother of mine got me a contract writing a website for his very Italian dad's school that he worked at overseas. My brother paid for an HTML template set me up in a VM and I wasn't even out of highschool.
I'm having a very good day today, and it's because someone was miraculously born a long time ago as a result of billions of years of entropy on this day of the calendar year.
My dad's never once talked to me and doesn't want to. His daughters blocked me on facebook.
Their loss.
I hope all of them are well.
My mom is an absolute gem. She's the smartest and funniest, most caring person I know. Her demons and her angels rival mine. She's my best friend. She's saved me from myself more times than I can remember and she's done it at her own peril and she literally superman jumped across a trench to save me from my curious self when I was like 2. The woman has superpowers.
Guys, don't ever smoke.
Learn a healthy way to take a break every so often. You deserve it and need it.
This article took a very unexpected turn, but I hope that's ok.
I owe my friends distant and near, separated even by years or continents an awful heck of a lot, too.