Ever since the last few years of high school, my friends knew me as the girl who was always preoccupied with something, the girl who barely slept at night, and the girl who literally had no free time. These descriptions make me seem like a girl who has no social life and is constantly groggy and uptight, but that isn’t the case.

You see, I thrive most when I have a busy schedule and at least five things on my to-do list every day. I love being on the move and getting tasks done. I hate having time during the day to just lay around and do nothing because I’ll probably end up wasting energy by scrolling through social media too many times on my phone.

There are days where my to-do list extends to over fifteen tasks and there are days where I feel like I don’t have enough time to get everything done. There are most definitely days where I feel like I need to sacrifice some sleep to complete all my tasks for the day and most of the time, I end up working into the late hours of the night on some caffeine.

People would always ask me questions about my jam-packed schedule and how I’m alive and functioning (almost) every day. How do you do that? Why do you choose to live like this? How do you function with two hours of sleep before a full day of school? How are you fully awake and energized at 4 am multiple days in a row? Aren’t you going to burn out?

I chose to get involved in things that required significant time and commitment, so I’m going to take the responsibility to learn how to manage my time in order to effectively accomplish all the tasks that I committed to.

That’s when I learned about the Pomodoro Technique. Yes, Pomodoro like the pasta. It’s called the Pomodoro Technique because of the tomato-shaped timer that Francesco Cirillo, the guy who invented this time-management technique, used in college when he came up with it.

You set a timer for 25 minutes and work on one task. When the timer goes off, you take a short 5-minute break. Then you set the timer again for 25 minutes and work on a different task. And then you repeat this, taking longer breaks every few hours to recharge. It was such a simple strategy, but it was surprisingly extremely effective.

I slightly altered this method to better fit my needs. I would map out my time every day after school and assign a specific amount of time to each task on my to-do list, and it would motivate me to complete each task during that block of time. I realized that taking major breaks in between tasks where I would lay around and do nothing to “recharge” actually drained my energy and made it harder for me to get back to work, so instead, I would move onto a different task to rest parts of my brain or body. These breaks didn’t feel like breaks, but they gave me the same recovery that a break typically should and prevented me from becoming easily exhausted.

I would incorporate social activities into this schedule as well — just because I have a lot of things to do doesn’t mean I can’t hang out with my friends. I wasn’t really able to make it to hangouts that were planned last minute, and spontaneous dinners were rarely ever possible, but I would always try my best to see my friends in between my schedules.

My busy schedule definitely exhausts me, but what people fail to realize is that when I reach that point of exhaustion, I sleep.

If I want to rest, I’ll rest completely. I sleep when I’m tired, and I work when I’m awake. I’m usually tired either right after school or at 3 am, so that’s when I would sleep. This is probably why I was seen wrapped up in my blanket taking a nap in the library during my free periods at school for the majority of senior year. From twenty minute power naps in the middle of the night to five hour naps immediately after school, I realized that the time of day didn’t matter. What mattered was whether or not I was getting work done, and whether or not it was an effective use of my time.

If I’m unable to fully focus on a task because I’m falling asleep, it could take me three hours to complete a task that would typically only take me one hour. On the other hand, if I’m wide awake and focused, it could even take me less time than usual to complete a task. Efficiency is key, so I would always rest to recharge because my time awake was so valuable. And if, for some reason, I couldn’t sacrifice any of my 24 hours for sleep, I would drink a coffee (or a Red Bull… oops) and get back to work.

I was once told that if I truly cared about something, I would always make time for it. And if you really don’t have time to do everything you care about, then you care about too many things. And that is 100% correct.