The Pomodoro Technique: How a Tomato Could Make You More Productive

1. Pick a task, and explicitly state my goal. You could write it down, but the point is just to have a better than high level idea of what you're doing it, so I just usually say it out loud to myself. For example, "Make the submission form for the user signup page".

2. Spend 30 minutes uninterrupted working on this goal - even if I'm stuck, poke at things, read documentation, do anything to move forward in the task even if just a little bit.

3. After the 30 minute mark, keep working on the task until I loose steam - and not necessarily at the task at hand. Sometimes I'll keep working for another four hours at this point, other times I'll stop at the 30 minute mark to regather my thoughts (but never before). Take a break, and then GOTO 1.

I do this with more than just programming - practicing piano, reading, running, cleaning, etc.

I find that the first 20 minutes of working on things are the hardest, since I'm still in the mode of formulating a problem, and filtering out information, distractions, etc. Building focus. So I would take breaks, surf hacker news, etc. Eventually I would get through that 20 minutes, but it would take a lot longer than 20 minutes. This forces me to get through that 20 minutes.

As a programmer, it can be hard to separate work from rest time (ie. does a 2 minute hacker news break while unit tests are running count as work, a break, or is it just wasted time?), and so I am trying to be more clear to myself about separating the two.

While I've never tried the pomodoro technique, at the surface it strikes me as too rigid. Some days I can work for hours on end without blinking - so all that I need is that single catalyst to kick off a day of productive work. Others, it takes all of my will power to write five lines of code. So I want something that pushes me to start, but gets out of the way after that.

Does anyone have experience with similar things?

1) getting "in the zone" takes less and less time. It used to take me most of my 20 minutes to actually get focused. Now, 3 or 4 minutes suffice.

2) the level of focus I reach is unusually high, especially for technical subjects.

A final remark is that I realized that you can do a lot of things by spending only 20 minutes every single day. A lot of things indeed.

The technique described in this post is more or less the exact technique I naturally use myself in order to get things done. Sometimes, it doesn't work. Usually, this is because I am over my work capacity for the day. In this instance, the only thing which works is to either slog through and get terrible productivity per hour, or just take the rest of the day off. The latter is usually the best option, which results in better concentration the next day. But eventually, it really comes down to just sitting down and getting stuff done. If you are consistently unable to do this, maybe you should consider whether you are in the right line of work?

I do feel that it can be contextually helpful, in that it works well when you have tons of small tasks out of the way - sometimes that's the best way to prevent the 8-2 situation you describe.