Jenny Lemons founder Jennie Lennick swears by this physical timer for staying focused — and the famous productivity technique that goes along with it.
Jennie Lennick, illustrator, designer, and founder of Jenny Lemons, has a lot on her to-do list and a lot of ways that her brain needs to function in during the day, from creative work designing her line of wildly popular, fruit-themed accessories to the dull drudge of business admin.
Along with her much-loved Anecdote daily planner, which she uses to schedule out daily checklists, meetings, and goals, Lennick’s other productivity tool is Time Timer’s stylish little 60-minute timer. She uses it with the Pomodoro technique to work in focused 25-minute blocks and plan out mental breaks between bursts, too — no looking at a phone involved.
“Using time blocking helps some people with ADHD, but [so does] also using a Pomodoro tomato timer method,” she says. ‘This keeps me off my phone, and it’s a visual timer.”
She sets it in Pomodoro-style working blocks of 25 minutes, and she credits its tangible, physical presence to helping her work.
“I’ll turn this on, and I’m like, ‘For the next 25-minute block, I’m working on one of these things: I’m working on product design for 25 minutes, no matter what.’ I can watch this go,” Lennick says. “Or I’m like, ‘I’m editing photos.’ That one tab is up for 25 minutes. Then when I get to the end, I take a five-minute break.”
“I try to do a few sessions of that a day, and that helps me just be really productive,” Lennick says. After reviewing her daily to-dos, she can easily assign blocks of time to individual tasks.
Bonus: If you’re a parent, setting the timer can motivate little ones, too (especially in mornings, a classic peak-struggle time).
“I’m like, ‘We’ve got to get dressed,’ and I’ll tell [my daughter] to get dressed, and then she’ll be somewhere else,” Lennick says.
At that point, she brings out the mom-voice and implements some time restrictions: “I’m like, ‘We have to get dressed. You have five minutes.’ And she’s like, ‘OK.’ So, it helps all of us, I feel.”
