Ask HN: Alternatives to the Pomodoro technique?
The Pomodoro is the default standard for productivity. It's certainly concise and low-overhead, but can still be scaled into elaborate systems. However, I wonder if anyone ever has problems following it. And if so, what are alternative methods to focused work and productivity?
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
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[ 559 ms ] story [ 432 ms ] threadHave 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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'.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I suspect everyone has a different rhythm, or lack thereof.
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.
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...
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).
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).
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?
As for managing distractions, I use self-messages in Telegram as an inbox for any spontaneous ideas.
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).
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).
https://liampulles.com/blog/jira-tickets
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
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.
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.