The invention discloses a method for shortening a pulse and obtaining an adjustable picosecond pulse, which comprises the steps of firstly modulating a pumping source to generate an optical pulse or an electric pulse to excite a gain switch type semiconductor laser, generating pulse laser with a chirp pulse component and a steady-state pulse component, then leading the pulse laser to a filter element through a light path, and obtaining short wave laser or long wave laser after filtering treatment, wherein the short wave laser is from the initial pulse component, has extremely short pulse widthcan achieve the purpose of shortening the pulse, and the filtering parameters are adjusted to change the wavelength and the pulse width of the short wave pulse laser so as to achieve pulse adjustment. The method can be applied to a single-mode gain switch semiconductor laser. Compared with common methods such as chirp compensation and pulse compression, the method has the advantages of simplicity, high feasibility and low cost, can conveniently obtain the adjustable picosecond pulse with high spectral purity, narrow optical pulse width and weak pulse jitter, combines the technologies such asoptical amplification and wavelength transfer, and can be applied to many fields such as multiphoton imaging and time resolution spectrum.