If your team is in crunch time and needs to work on a larger project together, this is a great method of coworking. Whether you're remote or in office together (and especially if you're hybrid/distributed), you can use this as a way to get a ton of work done together, without burning out your team.
Pomodoro is a time management method created in the 1980's that has recently been repopularized in digital circles.
The technique has six stages:
To use this method as a group, bring everyone together either on Zoom / Teams, or have everyone in-office together in a conference room or shared space. Make sure they bring their work materials with them, if you're doing this in person, or let everyone go back to their desks and then reconvene every 25 minutes.
You can use a ready-made and timed interactive Pomodoro group session slide deck to run this event. Everyone can just join on their phones to participate, and it does the timing automatically for you. This is a great way to simply get started, if you don't want to do any prep work.
1. Explain that instead of a typical meeting, you'll be doing a group coworking session to try out the Pomodoro method together.
2. Either use the automatically timed Pomodoro group session slide deck above to bring ready made structure, or you can run the event manually: first go around the room and ask people to share what project or task they'll be working on. If you have a large group, breakout rooms are good for this.
3. Once you're ready to start, set a timer for 25 minutes. You can do this very easily using a cell phone timer, or here is a list of free Pomodoro timers. Then simply allow everyone heads-down work time, for 25 minutes.
4. Take 5 minute breaks after each 25 minute block. Let people do what they need during this period, from bathroom/coffee breaks to chatting to zoning out.
5. At the end, we recommend coming back together to go over what everyone accomplished / wins /stumbling blocks / likes and disklikes about the session.
Congrats! You've run a group Pomodoro meeting!
