Put time on your side: time and task management and the Pomodoro technique for increased efficiency
Agnès González, Ann King and Oliver Shaw (Spain)
What we actually accomplish in the period of time we allocate to work is a fundamental question. How can we do more quality work in the shortest time possible while striking a healthy balance between career and leisure? Many professionals struggle with focus and efficiency, resulting in anxiety, unnecessarily long hours and sub-optimal performance.
The first part of this session introduces a popular and user-friendly productivity system known as the Pomodoro technique, in which tasks are divided into a pre-planned series of intensive, timed work blocks, each followed by periods of rest. Participants will receive an overview of the technique and examples will depict actual use of Pomodoro techniques, free materials available on the web and apps for ease of use. The desktop app StayFocused will also be discussed as a complementary tool for avoiding productivity pitfalls.
This will be followed by two presentations dealing more specifically with applications designed to help us control our time and the tasks we have to get done. Among other things, time-tracking software can help us to analyze our business, identify weaknesses in our process, provide a basis for billing, and reduce wasted time. More than just a to do list, task management software can change the way we organize our work, help us to prioritize, and free us from constant angst about what we should be doing or what we might be forgetting, thereby improving our productivity. It allows us to review and track our tasks from home, work, or in fact anywhere, on desktop or mobile devices. The strength of a good app is its simplicity and how well it integrates seamlessly into the way we work.
Agnès González Dalmau has been a freelance translator and editor for more than ten years. Although she has worked with many different types of texts, she is particularly experienced in the fields of social sciences, humanities, civil engineering, architecture and advertising. She has been a member of APTIC since 2010.
Ann King is a freelance translator and editor who lives and works in Barcelona. She has a background in computer training and is fascinated by the ways new technologies can help (and hinder) us in our work and everyday lives.
Oliver Shaw is a language consultant at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria-Fundación Jiménez Díaz, the research arm of a teaching hospital located in Madrid. In addition to editing and translating biomedical texts for doctors and researchers, he works as an adjunct professor of English for Nursing at the Universidad Camilo José Cela and is currently writing his doctoral thesis on academic discourse.
