Speaker 1: Transcriber's Name Reviewer's Name When I first told my friends that I was doing a talk on a study method that I used, I could see the collective look of disgust that swept across their faces as they processed what I just told them. So, bear with me, as I firmly believe that the Pomodoro Method has the power to change your life. My typical cycle of studying used to start out determined. I would come home, sit down at my desk, and do a couple of worksheets. The only problem was that productiveness only lasted for an hour, as I would easily get distracted. I would usually spend a couple hours on my phone, and then I would snap back into determination, but find myself getting burned out once again as the minutes ticked away. I would work until I physically couldn't anymore. I'd pass out, utterly exhausted. In my rigorous course choice this year, I had made myself promise that I would be productive. I had to. I had to succeed. And yet, I failed to do that every single day. I struggled to stay afloat, fatigued, stressed, and strained, and I snapped as a result. And quite truthfully, I was disappointed. Disappointed with myself. Then, one day, I came across a video. It was a video telling me how to study better, and I was intrigued by one specific tip, the Pomodoro Method. So what is it exactly? Well, you start out by deciding on a task and estimating the amount of time that it will take you. Take, for instance, this AP World chapter outline. I estimate that it will take me 4 hours of work, give or take. But instead of thinking about the outline as 4 hours of work, I'm going to think about it in terms of 25-minute increments, or Pomodoros. So this outline would, in theory, take me 8 Pomodoros. The next step is to work for those 25 minutes with absolutely no distractions, or you have to restart the Pomodoro. But after that hyper-focused work, you get to reward yourself with a 5-minute break, which serves to recharge and refresh you in preparation for the next Pomodoro. 4 cycles of this pattern of 25 5-minutes, and then you get to take a long break, 15 to 30 minutes. For myself, I typically still try to stay off my phone during these breaks and make some coffee, take a short walk, or when I want to feel super productive, I'll do chores. I know. Shocker. This method was actually developed in the 90s by Francisco Cirillo, who named the system Pomodoro, which means tomato in Italian, after this 25-minute kitchen timer that he used to track his work. It is important to know that although he developed the system for a 25 5-minute pattern, the Pomodoro is a fluid system. It's designed to help you and help you with your work. For myself, I stick to the traditional 25 5-minute pattern when I'm doing worksheets or studying for tests, but for longer, more time-consuming assignments, like, let's say, projects or essays, I choose to work for much longer increments and take shorter breaks. So here I am now. I'm still not the perfect student, and I want to iterate that, but the Pomodoro has changed me. It's changed the way I think and act about my work. When needed, I could spend a full day simply working, as I am just recharged and kept stimulated through the whole day. With the timer constantly ticking, I find myself working quickly in order to achieve and accomplish those goals through each 25-minute increment. And quite truthfully, it just feels so much more rewarding and fulfilling, being able to check things off after the other, watching your pile of work go down, knowing that you accomplished something that day instead of not to call you out but wasting two hours on Netflix. So now it's my turn to ask you, are you as efficient as you can be? Are you productive, or does your time seem to just slip away? Do you complete your work, or is it scraped together at the last minute? The Pomodoro is a fluid system designed to help you produce higher-quality work in a shorter amount of time. But whatever method, I encourage you to think about your time differently, to set goals for yourself and strive to meet them, to set aside the constant distractions and focus on your tasks at hand. You never know how much time you really have until you start to use it, and it looks like my break is over. Thank you. Thank you.