I tried Pomodoro a while ago and found 25 mins too short to do anything especially coding. Then I adopted a variant of it: 50 mins timer for work and 10 minutes break time. The tool I use is the timer feature of iPhone Clock app. Have boosted my productivity a lot.
This has been mentioned before on HN and I'll take that as a general vote of confidence. The official site has videos that don't want to play (on my laptop) and seem to expect one to buy the book in order to learn it.
Curious. I've actually found the opposite, even when writing fiction. In my case, at least, I find that the mandatory breaks both keep me from diving too deep down off-topic rabbit holes and free my subconscious to solve plot or structure problems.
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"productivity systems like The Pomodoro Technique are useful when it comes time to execute tasks"
I highly recommend Pomodoro technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/) for greater productivity with less stress.
I tried Pomodoro a while ago and found 25 mins too short to do anything especially coding. Then I adopted a variant of it: 50 mins timer for work and 10 minutes break time. The tool I use is the timer feature of iPhone Clock app. Have boosted my productivity a lot.
25 minutes is too short, but I've found that a 90 / 15 minute cycle works for me.
I highly recommend this Pomodoro extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/strict-pomodoro/cg...
You set the minutes per cycle and what sites to block. Once a cycle is started it blocks those sites until the timer is up.
I do research for a living, and I thought it was horrible.
I can't "cache in" what I need to to make progress in 25 minutes, so it just meant that I never made progress.
This has been mentioned before on HN and I'll take that as a general vote of confidence. The official site has videos that don't want to play (on my laptop) and seem to expect one to buy the book in order to learn it.
Here is a TL;DR version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
I can't recommend Pomodoro enough for most tasks!
Don't use it for writing and similar things though, the breaks will be noticeable in your output.
Curious. I've actually found the opposite, even when writing fiction. In my case, at least, I find that the mandatory breaks both keep me from diving too deep down off-topic rabbit holes and free my subconscious to solve plot or structure problems.
I'm also recommending this technique. Finally focusing on one task for 25 minutes is very difficult!
Third'd. It made a substantial difference to my daily productivity.