Writing and code review mostly, working from home, no hard interruptions to blame. Short timers make me stop exactly when it has finally started working, and long ones make starting feel enormous so I do not start at all. I have given both a month. Is the length even the variable here, or am I optimising something that does not matter?
You have found the actual insight without noticing it: the timer is good at starting and bad at stopping. So use it only for starting. Set it for whatever length makes beginning feel trivial, ten minutes is fine, and when it goes off you are allowed to stop but you are not required to, and if the work is flowing you simply carry on until it is not. That kills both of your problems at once, because the start is cheap and the stop is determined by the work rather than the clock. The Pomodoro rule about honouring the break exists to build a habit for people who never stop, which is not your problem.
Open ended with a floor rather than a ceiling worked for me. Rule is ten minutes minimum, no maximum, and I am not allowed to check anything during the ten. About seventy percent of the time the ten minutes turns into an hour, which is the whole point, and the other thirty percent I genuinely was not able to work and I have learned something about the day rather than sitting there resenting a timer.
Match the block to the shape of the task rather than picking one length for everything. Code review is naturally chunked, one file or one PR, so short timed blocks fit it well. Writing has a warm up cost of maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before anything good comes out, which means a twenty five minute block is almost entirely warm up and then a bell. I run about forty five to fifty for writing, open ended when it is going well, and twenty five for anything I am avoiding. Two lengths, chosen by task, not one universal number.
The warm up cost is the thing that makes short blocks so bad for writing. You pay it every single time you restart.
Length is not the variable, starting is. Any timer that gets you into the chair works, and the good sessions all end because the work ended.
@skillet_sara · 7d ago
Going to defend the break, since everyone here is treating it as the annoying part. The reason long blocks collapse at forty minutes is often that you have not taken a break in the previous three hours and you are running on fumes by the time you sit down. When I actually take the short break away from a screen, stand up, look out of a window, my second and third blocks are nearly as good as the first. When I skip them, the second block is the one that dies at forty. The length may not be your variable at all, what happens between the blocks might be.
Reply
Report