Using Rescue Time to track what I spend time on, I found that days where I stuck to the Pomodoro timer fanatically resulted in more time spent on work (broadly defined as my job, or work on one of my projects), approximately 1 1⁄2 hours more. Interestingly, the days where I cheated on the Pomodoro app and worked through the break times as well felt more productive but I stopped working (or stopped focusing on work) much earlier. So this is surprising: when I feel like I can power through, I probably should not.
I have also just begun Paleo dieting again, as well as an exercise routine (I started to reply to the Minimum Viable Exercise thread and consciously turned the “LessWrong comment time!” feeling into an exercise plan (that I saved instead of posting to the thread).
This is interesting. Today was my first day of pomodoro usage (I use Rescue Time since a while). Afternoon I just decided to switch it off because I found it to kill my flow… That been said the reason why I started with pomodoro today was because I was procrastinating and used the time to try several pomodoro timers. My problem is getting started and hoped that setting myself to just do 1 pomodoro would make it easier to get going (which it didn’t help...).
But once I am going I can work easily more than an hour without distractions (this I know from Rescue Time) and maybe pomodoro won’t be a good solution for me. Stil it was just a first day, will try again, maybe also experiment with longer work units...
Since you played around with several pomodoros...did you manage to find one that cycles automatically, without needing user input to restart the cycle? I’ve found that I tend to start procrastinating after the end of a “break” so having that choice taken away would be useful for me.
Using Rescue Time to track what I spend time on, I found that days where I stuck to the Pomodoro timer fanatically resulted in more time spent on work (broadly defined as my job, or work on one of my projects), approximately 1 1⁄2 hours more. Interestingly, the days where I cheated on the Pomodoro app and worked through the break times as well felt more productive but I stopped working (or stopped focusing on work) much earlier. So this is surprising: when I feel like I can power through, I probably should not.
I have also just begun Paleo dieting again, as well as an exercise routine (I started to reply to the Minimum Viable Exercise thread and consciously turned the “LessWrong comment time!” feeling into an exercise plan (that I saved instead of posting to the thread).
This is interesting. Today was my first day of pomodoro usage (I use Rescue Time since a while). Afternoon I just decided to switch it off because I found it to kill my flow… That been said the reason why I started with pomodoro today was because I was procrastinating and used the time to try several pomodoro timers. My problem is getting started and hoped that setting myself to just do 1 pomodoro would make it easier to get going (which it didn’t help...).
But once I am going I can work easily more than an hour without distractions (this I know from Rescue Time) and maybe pomodoro won’t be a good solution for me. Stil it was just a first day, will try again, maybe also experiment with longer work units...
Since you played around with several pomodoros...did you manage to find one that cycles automatically, without needing user input to restart the cycle? I’ve found that I tend to start procrastinating after the end of a “break” so having that choice taken away would be useful for me.
Try Workrave with a 25⁄5 break cycle.
If you are Emacs user then this does what you need: pomodoro.el.