Ask HN: What tools/methods do you use to focus your time well?

what do you during your breaks? This I think is the greatest pitfall for me. Get up and walk around? I usually find that I just want to go back to work once I let my mind wander.

1. pomodoro method (plan out the day in half-hour time blocks, there's a bunch of other stuff I don't do)

2. build sunshade for laptop, go work in the park, turn off all laptop radios to save battery

This won't work if you need the internet to get stuff done of course. Works for me though.

When I am really fighting to Be Productive, I will take out a physical timer that I have modified to be my Pomodoro Timer by painting over everything past twenty five minutes. When I am not I will just loosely track my time with Time Sink.

About 10oz of coffee first thing in the morning. Then I let the world come to me ;) Being more of a maverick personality type, I don’t even entertain “methods” or “systems” to structure my life. I pretty much just follow whatever thread I’m on and do what seems best in the moment. At least this hasn’t failed me yet.

I do tend to struggle with a little ADHD, which the coffee helps with. Other than that I just try to have fun and blaze an interesting trail each day (though hardly ever consciously).

I've been trying out a slight variation on todo.txt format, for a lightweight way to prioritizing and scheduling things I should spend time on, including bumping tasks to the next day (to narrow down what I can do today). I have a bunch of low-priority tasks that have been getting bumped for maybe a year, and sometimes I remove tasks that I've been bumping for a while and seem like they'll never be worth doing. https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/

Empty email inbox is another. Stuff in the inbox is stuff I either haven't yet read, am dealing with immediately, or haven't yet decided whether to star (for attention later) before "archiving". I have a search folder that shows everything in the archive that's starred. (The archive gets purged periodically, after some time has passed, and once I've resolved all the starred messages.) I usually start checking email first thing when I wake up, but am careful to leave stuff in the inbox until after I'm sure I've woken up fully (had a decaf, exercised).

For things to very quickly note in the moment, and possibly deal with someday later, I have a very simple Emacs package that quickly creates a timestamped text "document" file in some category directory. This can also be good for not getting distracted thinking about problems to solve: you've quickly captured the data you might need, without distraction or even worrying about grammar or format, so you don't have to deal with it further right now. https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs-qd/