I've seen only one before- the Flowtime Technique, which is really just Pomodoro with no preset time blocks and with flexible breaks.
https://medium.com/@UrgentPigeon/the-flowtime-technique-7685101bd191
I've seen only one before- the Flowtime Technique, which is really just Pomodoro with no preset time blocks and with flexible breaks.
https://medium.com/@UrgentPigeon/the-flowtime-technique-7685101bd191
58 comments
My flow recipe is as follows:
* A comfortable environment, i.e.: a comfortable, pleasant, quiet place (can use noise cancelling headphones).
* I mark on Slack that I am in deep work for an hour, set an alarm on my phone, and then close all communication tabs (slack, email, etc.)
* I've found Youtube Music's "Focus" section to be pretty good for focus music, but I have a couple go-to albums and playlists I can use also.
* I rigourously plan out my work before I get into it, and I also re-plan a bit as I get going. I don't want my brain to have to keep track of what I need to do and to the greatest degree reasonable I don't want to think about how to do XYZ. I wrote a bit about this: https://liampulles.com/blog/jira-tickets
* I try not to keep snacks in my apartment. Again this is in service of not allowing there to be an avenue for the brain to shift to. I've settled on Almonds.
* Being able to put work out of mind at the end of the day is important. For me, running helps relieve tension - but there are other ways.
I would add that, at least for me, planning each day out is beneficial as well. When I don't have a plan for a day, I often will sit there, not really doing anything, and not sure what to start doing. This typically ends when I get distracted by something (maybe a question on Slack), and overall leads to some very unproductive days.
Even a simple high-level plan, like "today I want to get these tickets ready for review and work on this RFC", is incredibly helpful for me. A weekly plan may be even more effective, but I struggle to plan that far in advance.
* Remind me to drink water * Remind me to move, i.e. stand up, walk a few meter, stretch my arms, etc * Remind me to question myself, whether I dug myself into a rabbit hole or whether I am distracted
For me, it's the opposite. This is one of my favorite things about doing pomodoros.
I hate to be the tactibro who sources inspirational quotes from special forces influencers, but I worked with a guy who introduced me to the phrase "go before you're ready," and I really took it to heart as a check against my natural tendency to leave problems alone and wait for them to get easier. I got this tendency from studying math in school, where I fell in love with the magic of getting stuck on a hard problem, putting it aside, and having the solution come to me hours later while I was thinking about something else.
That approach works when my subconscious has everything it needs to work on the problem, like when writing proofs for a math class, but at my job I'm usually working in a different way, where the solution depends on concrete details that I'm in the process of learning, such as a new part of a codebase, a new library, a new API, etc. I can't delegate that kind of work to my subconscious, because my subconscious isn't going to read documentation and write exploratory code. But my brain keeps whispering, "You're stuck. Take a break."
Because of this, I love the "go before you're ready" aspect of doing Pomodoros.
90% of my inability to start something is procrastinating because I don't know the full picture yet, but every time I get started I figure it out. Just have to go before you're ready
In practice I'll happily ignore the "take a 5 min break" part of the Pomodoro method but I definitely take real breaks every hour or two.
People used to being interrupted either get nothing done or weave practices into their routine that help them remember where they left off. Used to be when I was young and an enthusiastic proponent of Flow state (neither of which are true anymore), I would pretty confidently pull on threads until I had six or seven things on my todo list, and manage to almost always remember all of them.
But these are moderately large rewrites pretending to be refactoring by misusing the tools and ignoring the goals and values. So these days I tend to use that mental model to do more reading and trying to get closer to the crux of the issue instead of starting to type and hoping for my brain to catch up with my fingers within a few dozen lines of code, which isn't happening if we've arrived at the adjective "large".
I haven't articulated this before so I don't really have a handy list of all of the tools and tricks I utilize for this, but I can say that conditional breakpoints are one of the ways I augment that memory. Even if I get pulled off into a production issue, these breakpoints are a much better reminder of what I was thinking about than a simple breakpoint.
I've been using pomodoro for many years. Not continuously though because I find that my productivity level is extremely high while doing it and I start to get burned out because the intermittent breaks are not enough.
You might be interested in something called the domino technique to help with getting started / getting into flow. Basically you do something that is difficult but short that you can do to get a meaningful psychological "win" in a short period of time (5 minutes) to kick start your motivation / flow. I would post a link but I don't have a good reference on hand.
It doesn't work for me though because I'm really independent and totally not competitive. I just don't care about my peers. I hate team sports also for this case because I'll always get kicked out for not caring about the team's goals.
It's a bit difficult sometimes because all companies think they only need 'team players'. I can be extremely loyal to people I care about but I need to build up that care naturally, them being part of some arbitrary 'team' doesn't work for me. Hard to explain :)
And as I notice, my problem at times is that my tasks are like "You are a Roman General. You have 3 Legions. Conquer Europe north of this line."
For me personally, it's better to have a task like "Alternate pick the A-Minor scale on the bass 2 times up and down at 120bpm". Easy and simple to do I'd say. And then you realize that other thing. And then that other thing. And then you watch some Vids from Ola, Bernth, Glenn. And suddenly you've noodled 2 hours on the guitar.
Since we all know how this goes, I would say procrastination is a survival instinct.
Some days when I don't use it I end up working for many hours without a break, and my productivity would've been higher with regular breaks. I also find myself drifting to tasks which seem important but aren't, like a random refactor. Pomo helps me be conscious every half hour about what I want to work on
If you don't have those problems, it probably won't offer you anything
Sometimes it is mostly a trick to get me started (ok, I need to do this only for $n minutes, I could do that) and then I ignore the pause, because the clock is not the boss of me and I am in the flow
To keep this from being a tradeoff between productivity and rotten teeth I bought a selection of sugar-free sweets on the internet.
After the habit was formed, I introduced a gambling element by always having six different kinds of sweets on display, some more desirable than others. A dice roll decides which one I get. This is to approximate a variable-ratio reward schedule which is known to make the habit more resistant to extinction.
Does Seah's Emergent Task Planning [0] count ? It involves choosing a couple of tasks for the day, blocking them out, but allowing and recording interruptions.
[0] https://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-planner/
Does Allen's Getting Things Done count ? It involves sorting work at milestones (weekly, monthly), and doing each for some reasonable amount of time, chosen by the doer. Anything that takes five minutes or less, should be done immediately.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139432
Does the Montessori method of teaching [2] count ? It seems to involve the student learner engaging with a single chosen subject for several hours at a time.
[2] https://montessorifortoday.com/what-is-the-montessori-teachi...
Do the dicta 'do something until you are bored', 'perservere until you are exhausted', and 'multitasking is okay' count ?
I am of the impression that productivity strategies are just frameworks for thought. Each, with or without a formal Author's name attached, is just somewhere on the spectrum/surface of counting some work as more or less worthy of focus with heuristics for 'focus can last a some amount of time'.
Set a stopwatch going but out of sight. When you run out of steam check it. If it’s been less than 25 minutes keep going. If greater, have a break scaled to the time you worked.
I started doing this because I couldn’t get on board with breaking up the work I enjoyed doing, but I recognized the utility of having breaks when that wasn’t the case.
I did this on paper for a few months and eventually turned it into an app called Contadino for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and visionOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/contadino/id1672167389).
First: in the morning, I decide what things I would like to try do today, and make some checkboxes in my notebook - some of these are boxes representing a half hour of work on a larger project, some of these are boxes representing shopping lists, I know which is which. Unlike the Pomodoro method I am not deciding exactly what I am going to do today, so it's okay if I have several more half-hour boxes than I know I can complete in a day.
Second: I do things. I don't pull out the timer, I just do things, and take breaks between them. The time I spent originally using the timer developed a pretty decent sense for a half hour of work, so I'll often find myself saying "how long have I been working on this project" and checking Time Sink's window at around a half an hour. Maybe I'll get up and take a serious break, maybe I'll blow it off. At some point I'll probably be climbing on my bike to go between my home and the various cafes/parks I work in so I've got a decent amount of "get off my ass and focus on something further than 4' away" built into my life.
I'll check off time blocks in the notebook as I get a chance. I also keep running time track charts in my working files, I'm an artist and it's nice to pull up a finished piece months later and say "this took me 5h spread out over a week" when thinking about future prices, or to look at the time spent on a half-finished piece and think about how much more time I have on the clock before (agreed-upon price)/(hours worked) drops too low, and maybe stop obsessing over an area that's acceptable but not great to go make sure every other part of the piece is going to be acceptable before I run out of time.
Third: repeat every work day for the rest of your life.
This works for me as a freelance artist. Sometimes I get sick and don't do this. Sometimes I get depressed and don't do this. Sometimes if I've stopped doing this for a while I'll take out the physical timer and start doing a more serious Pomodoro Routine to kind of reset myself. But really as a general rule I don't need the whole formal procedure.
Then, every 10 minutes, I get a new notification.
It's a small mod but it changes a lot my perception of the technique. It creates a lot less frustration as I can finish the task I am working on without losing track of the time passing.
I coded a web version of this variant here: https://focusplus.io You can try it, it's 100% free (still in the early days tho)
One small feedback- the motion design is waaay too much. You should consider dialing it back 2-3x.
Yes the idea was to create a tool to help you go through your day, not something super complex (we all already have our systems in place)
Gotcha for the motion, I'll reduce it a bit :)
On these days I start once, and never have to overcome that barrier again. If I was using pomodoro, I’d have to overcome that barrier 16 times, and lose time/energy to having to restart and remember what I was doing. Meetings and messages from people are bad enough for interruptions, I don’t need to manufacture extra ones.
Sadly, due to excessive meetings, these days are rare, but when they happen I get so much done and feel so good afterward. Although sometimes my brain has this weird tingling sensation afterward. I’m not sure what to make of that.
I used to be like this myself. In the last few years, alas, I realized that this behavior was unhealthy for my physical body. Just a word of caution. What your mind prefers to do is not necessarily the best for your entire self.
The last time I had one of these days I finished every user story I had in one day. These stories had been carried over for multiple sprints, I just couldn’t get the time. I was feeling really bad about them hanging out there for so long, like a failure. Finishing them all felt great and showed me that it wasn’t me, it was the company culture causing most of my issues. I’m actually in dire need of another one of these days.
If you want to test one method that works well and can be tested in literally minutes, try body doubling. It boils down to working in the presence of another person - preferably a stranger or someone with authority. It's a strange effect, but it works surprisingly well for some of the hardest procrastinators. You can try it online here: - https://workmode.net/ - if you want to use this method for work, or you suffer from social anxiety, - https://www.focus101.com/ - the community is pretty small, which might be a good thing if you like to feel cozy, - https://www.focusmate.com/ - the largest body-doubling portal.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of WorkMode.net
Lately been so busy that's it hard to get focus, I've been breaking up the day into 1 & 2 hour blocks.
Gives me a pass to forget the rest and just focus on that item and the rest has it's own designated time.
Of course doesn't always go right or work, but going back to it makes me understand where I have room & when I can relax.
Also different from todo, since focus is not on finishing tasks.
As I am somebody that currently medicates with stimulants for their ADHD induced inattention, I still have a big bag of tricks to make me do stuff.
And there are many hacks - you limit the scope (Tiny Habbits by BJ Fogg is a masterclass on this, and Unfck your habitat by Rachel Hoffman falls here too)
I used to live by my work-playlist. I.e. Tron Legacy OST could give me more than an hour of uninterupted focus!
Having another person can be helpful as well - doesn't matter if oyu work from home with partner or friend, go back to the office, to the library or stream your workflow - I sometimes make one where I am the only person in the meeting, but just the possibility that somebody joins while I am sharing my screen keeps me productive.
I assume that pair-programming can similarily help.
Having good break rituals as well - "Going to get coffee/soda" is well defined and I can return back.
Having nice actual work environment where I don't need to remember too much and the feedback loop is tight. I am doing much of my prototiping in shell or in notebook environment, where answer to "so what will this actually do" is usually single key-stroke away.
In the end you will need to figure this out. Some people live by library-rules and quiet. Other work better with people and abient conversation. Sometimes you will have a specific project that works in a way that just clicks and you won't need so many productivity hacks.
1. If you're not a single person (ie, you have children and/or spouse) then the idea of an "uninterrupted pomodoro" is nothing but a dream. Things happen. If you don't pause or restart the pomodoro you leave it on and then you give up and move on to the next one, or you work through the break to make for the lost focus.
2. Breaks can often feel like a waste of time when you're in a good flow state. Why stop because your timer says so? I'd often go for several breaks/pomodoros without paying any attention to my timer.
3. Sometimes starting the pomodoro would take a lot of effort (more so than just working). I think it's because you know when you start you're locked in for 25 minutes... if you don't have a clear task and motivation to start you end up delaying.
The list goes on and on... ultimately, I said to hell with it.
Instead, I put my tasks in a Moleskine notebook, mixed with other notes and ideas of mine. In front of each task I put a square box, to be checked when the task is completed in the future. Usually tasks are 1-2 hours long, they are for evenings, longer tasks are for weekends. It's crucial to keep tasks small, no longer than 1 day of work, so split big tasks into small. This is crucial, as abstract tasks lead to procrastination and make you lose focus. The checkbox gives satisfaction when done and remains in the notebook, so that you can see a lot of completed by reviewing your notes.
I use this technique for 3 years now and it works for me. Not sure if it's known by other name as I came to it myself. Hopefully, this can be useful for others as well.
The first one is made to plan your day and clear your mind, whereas the latter is made to help you go through that list while being as productive as possible.
You can totally use both
Definitely, some can use both.
Again, it very much depends on the persona. All I need to be productive is a clear to-do list and no destruction, to focus on my work. No extra techniques, like Pomodoro, is necessary in my case.
If you can get past the washi tape and calligraphy brigade, and sprinkle a few reviews/mid-term plans, it’s actually pretty effective (at least I have found it so).
Pomo is best for people who have trouble staying on-task. You see the countdown in the corner of your screen and focusing isnt so bad because you have a specific end-time. But, in my experience it only works well if you are the sort who doesn't get a lot of interruptions.
I use a printout system (Emergent Task Planner) plus Clockify to help track the real time spent on each task. It works ok and my time is billable so accurate timekeeping is a must.
https://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-planner/
eta: i also keep an analog clock on my desk. I didn't bookmark it but sometime ago I read a piece on here about how digital clocks aren't good for measuring the passage of time and I think there really is something to it.
The goal is to maintain an index card database but I'm not there yet.
https://liampulles.com/blog/jira-tickets
https://www.ultraworking.com/twg went out of business, but see if you can dig up their template.
Cal Newport on time blocking: https://calnewport.com/deep-habits-the-importance-of-plannin...
I typically do 2 pomodoros in a row, and then a 5-10 minute break. But if I feel like working longer (ie I'm in flow state) I keep going.
The breaks are really helpful for getting up and stretching though. Walking around. Giving the eyes a break from the screen.
I record each pomodoro I've finished in a notebook and on my pomodoro timer (a custom browser extension I made that stores a log of completed pomodoros with start and end dates, length, and notes all automatically). This helps me check how long I worked on each task that day. I can also go back and easily look at past days.
In the end, this is just a more flexible version of the pomodoro method, which I find really helpful for keeping myself on task + taking necessary breaks for my body and mind.
As for managing distractions, I use self-messages in Telegram as an inbox for any spontaneous ideas.
I used this to follow it in emacs before:
https://git.sr.ht/~swflint/third-time
However this one I haven't used looks more featureful:
https://github.com/SqrtMinusOne/pomm.el
They might play along, but internally I guarantee some of them are miserable.
If a team needs this frequent check ins there is either a misalignment of goals via too many cooks (PM/PO) in the kitchen, or there is a serious lack of trust in the team from the top down.
Anyway, work that requires focus should have natural rhythms: There's things that need to stay in my head, and if I get interrupted it's very hard to find my place. So I work without stop (except to pee) while these things are in my head, and I take a break once I finish enough that I can "forget" what's in my head.
It's something you'll understand if you've ever written complicated programs, or had to do something that requires intense concentration.
For example: I had to tweak a server-side Blazor application to deny access in a certain situation. Last Friday I did it in the UI, but that's not a good solution because there's ways to accidentally bypass the UI. The right way to deny access is in the Middleware, but I didn't have a lot of experience working with ASP Middleware. Thus, I couldn't start working with the Middleware in the last few minutes of the day (too much to learn).
I spent about 90 minutes this morning learning how to hook into ASP's middleware so I could deny access to the application. Once I learned how to do that, I ate lunch. After lunch, I closed all the browser windows that had the documentation for Middleware and wrote the error page. Now that I opened the PR, I'm taking a break on Hacker News.
Trying to fit that into a timer is impossible: If the timer went off while I was trying to figure out how to work with the Middleware, I'd have to re-read a lot of the stuff to get back into the puzzle.
The breaks are not so you stop thinking about what you're doing. They're to take you away from it. I continue to think during my breaks about what I'm doing.. I am just not allowed to do it.
It allows me to step back from what I'm doing and re-evaluate if what I'm doing at this very moment is what I should be doing. Otherwise, it's easy to get stuck just wanting to finish what you're doin
It also does allow me to stop thinking about what I'm doing, for a brief moment, while leaving the train of through intact in the subconscious.
Typically, when someone loses their train of thought because of distractions, it is because they have to switch what they're focused on. The train gets derailed because it has to go along another track. Pomodoro breaks are more like stopping the train to look around than switching tracks.
Furthermore, removing distractions and staying in your train of thought is what the technique is fundamentally all about. Once you start the technique, you'll notice that the requirement that you keep track of your distractions, allows you to focus on ridding yourself of distractions first and foremost. Once you have found a way to rid yourself of distractions, every moment of those 25 minutes becomes precious, your mind sharpens, and solutions become clear.
The breaks allow you to dis-engage, providing greater focus and clarity.
They're called pee breaks. Do you drink enough water?
One of the best methods I have in my personal inventory requires pen and sketchbook ("notebook without ruled lines") and revolves around keeping detailed, artful checklists and sequences that can easily be turned into checklists, present and floating in the front of my mind. Easily accessible via briefcase/bag, always available for you in your idle moment.
I think your question in the original post is more about how to structure your time investiture into your projects. No easy answer -- you must explore what works for you -- in general keep an outcome-oriented approach and focus on being extra productive in the Intensive Innovation Bursts that come with technological work. Productivity is not a jam that is spread evenly over the toast of work, it is more like a giant fruit that suddenly ripens and falls off a tree you spent many months cultivating.
https://blog.nestful.app/spontaneous-productivity/
In short: Almost nothing is scheduled. The "what do to" is decided upon at the moment of doing. Defining granular enough tasks is a valid replacement to Pomodoro.
This means a tool that always tells you "what's next" is needed, which is why I built https://Nestful.app.
Nestful is undergoing heavy refactoring this month, and while data is safe and stable, features and bugs are not. If you like the idea but find the instability troubling, send a support request mentioning this and I'll waive a couple of months of payment.
Have you encountered what’s called time-block planning or hyperscheduling?
There are many of these ideas floating around; I wouldn’t say any is the standard.
IIRC (I read it a while ago), in his book, Rapid Development, Steve McConnell described timeboxing, which may be the same as time-block planning, which I had not heard of until now.
Recently jumped on the Flowmodoro train which has been helpful doing creative work (https://focusedwork.app has been great for this), since I can keep going until I really need a break and my breaks are a fraction of the time I spend focusing.
But yeah Pomodoro is hard to use for anything that I need to focus on for a long period of time.
I almost never revisit the scans of these pages I fill daily (but i take dedicated separate notes when needed). Using the planner helps me to track time and to be productive as the day unfolds so the purpose is very much the same as the pomodoro.
For me it works much better than pomodoro which is imo too much about micromanaging productivity and too little about the big picture (which matters the most in the end of the day).
As I understand, Pomodoro’s purpose is to incrementally train you to stay on task for longer and longer durations.
Is that not working for you or do you have a different goal?
“The only technology that you need is deadlines“ - Paul Ford https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/deadlines-as-technology/
But apart from that, I personally need often 1 hour minimum to dive deeply into a problem and spend a considerable amount of time to begin or continue to solve it. I do not think that the pomodoro technique is apropriate for me.
According to who?
> what are alternative methods to focused work and productivity?
Set aside time at the beginning of your day to make a list of the things you want to do, prioritize that list and then do them.
https://www.amazon.com/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-plac...
This book helped me quite a bit.
Now when you need to get stuff done, tell yourself you want to try doing a task and see how quickly you can get it done. It's a race! Glance at your list, and grab whatever grabs you the most. Start a timer. Race to the end.
When i have to resort to pomodoro i know Im burnt out or aren’t addressing issues of self care.
I suspect everyone has a different rhythm, or lack thereof.
I tell everyone that I'm on vacation, set the vacation responder and all, and enjoy a few weeks of quiet productivity.
Or the tea timer technique, which is just 1-hour periods, with longer breaks where I make tea, clean up, stretch, etc. This works better than short Pomodoros for me.
That being said, Pomodoro is great for trudging through work I don't want to do and can't get into flow state for.
My go to is having 1-1:30 hour sessions where I am really focused and don't get distracted.
Just schedule the work you need to do and have some standards for yourself and keep working on it.
If you feel tired after a while you can train yourself to push through it if you really want to. Anyone who's ever run, lifted weights, done martial arts, etc, will tell you your real limit is well beyond your feelings.
If you're still tired, take a break, get a tea or a coffee and just go back to work.
The secret to get work done is to just sit down and do the work. Get used to being bored.
I base my studies on how the ancient scholars studied. In my opinion, the The Scholastics, also known as Schoolmen, marks the pinnacle of intellectual productivity and focus.
1. Stop speed reading
2. Stop listening to music or background noise
3. Stop taking frequent breaks
4. Spend more time reflecting vs moving on
5. Hit the "Runner's High of the Mind"
Speed reading is a curse of the modern age. If we analyze scholars of the past, we'd find that they were actually reading at talking speed. It wasn't until much more recently that people studied and read quietly to themselves. Walter Ong discusses this at exactly at 1:00:00 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2Z7ezRpz1c
There is no such thing as "focus music" or "music for studying". It's all a distraction. Research repeatedly show that music is detrimental to study. If you're still unconvinced, then let me put it another way for you: How many "renaissance men" studied with music? The answer is: zero
Reading a lot of books, articles, etc. does not make you smarter. Reflection is where real knowledge is created. The reflection processes forces one to recollect, which is crucial to solidifying whatever it is you learned into your memory so that it can be readily retrieved and used in the formation of new ideas. This is why hyperfocus always triumphs scattered focus, and why it is far better to study single subjects at a time over a span of months or years, rather than mixing up your days with many studies. Ultimately, the reason that reading lots of stuff doesn't make you smart is because nothing actually solidifies, so everything you read is more akin to entertainment than actual studying. Seneca discusses this: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-reading/ So yeah...read fewer books, but study more deeply! Naturally, this means you should be far more cautious as to what you should put your time towards reading.
Taking frequent breaks, as encouraged by Pomodoro, actually hinders your thinking. William James wrote about this in Energies of Men and calls it "Second Wind". It's like a runner's high for the mind. There comes a difficult point in our studies where we give up and take a break. The idea is to push beyond this point to reach a new state of thinking. We rarely are able to do it, but everyone has done it at some point in their life. The issue is sustaining it. You can read a little on it here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/06/15/william-james-the-...
What we love to do doesn’t need pomodoros.
It's fine to stop doing things. It's fine to procrastinate sometimes. Sometimes you need a time out on schedule. Forcing yourself to be productive leads to crap. Give yourself a break :)
Nitpick: it's never a good time to procrastinate. Procrastination, by definition, is bad. You might be confusing procrastination with leisure time. I agree though, that people go overboard with trying to be productive and fail to include leisure time in their schedule.
It seems to me that someone suffering from procrastination would also be very likely to have insufficient self-esteem and self-shaming tendencies. IMO it would be hence more appropriate to use more neutral or compassionate statements like "imagine spending decades of your life focusing on goals different from your current ones" or "imagine spending decades of your life trying to be productive only to be caught in negative thought patterns". Sentences like the one you wrote might give one a short-term boost but the real improvement comes from acceptance of self and the past as well as from serenity and calmness (imo).