I have a 45 minute sand glass timer and a simple abacus on my desk. Each row on the abacus corresponds to one type of activity that I could be doing, e.g. writing, studying, coding, emails and surfing,… First, I decide what type of activity I’d like to do and then start the 45 minute sand glass. I then do that kind of activity until it ends. At which point I count it on my abacus and have at least a 5 minute break. There are no rules about what I have to do, I do what ever I want. But I always do it in focused 45 minute units.
If you try this, do it exactly as I describe, at least to start with, as there are reasons for each of the elements. Let me explain some of them. Firstly the use of a physical timer and abacus. Having them sitting on your desk in view makes them a lot more effective than using something like a digital timer and spreadsheet on your computer. When you look up you see the sand running out. When you take a break you see a colourful physical bar graph of your time allocation—it’s there looking at you.
45 minutes is important because it’s long enough to get a reasonable amount done if you work in a focused way, but it’s short enough not to be discouraging, unlike an hour. Even with something I don’t particularly want to do, sitting down and doing just 45 minutes of it is a bearable concept, knowing that at the end I’ll have a break and then do something else if I want to. Also if you look at human mental performance, it doesn’t make much sense trying to do more than 45 minutes hard work at a time. Better to have a break for 5 to 15 minutes and then start again. As I think 15 minute breaks are essential, at the end of the week the total number of units counted on my abacus are my total number of at-work-activity hours for the week.
Having no rule about what you have to do is also important. If you put rules in place you will start avoiding using the system. The only thing is that when you start a unit of 45 minutes you have to go through with it. But you’re free not to start one if you don’t want to. You might then think that you’d always just do the kind of work that you like doing, rather than units of the stuff you avoid but should be doing. Interestingly, no, indeed often I find that the reverse starts to happen, even though I’m not really aiming for that. The reason is the principle that what you measure and keep in mind you naturally tend to control. Thus you don’t actually need any rules, in fact they are harmful as they make you dislike and avoid the system.
Another force at work is that momentum often builds enthusiasm. Thus you think that you’ll just do 45 minutes on some project due in a week that you’d rather not be doing at all, and after that unit of time you actually feel like doing another one just to finish some part of it off.
So yeah, the only real rule is that when the sand glass is running you have to stay hard at work on the task, which isn’t too bad as it’s only so many minutes more before you’re taking a break and once again free.
UPDATE: So it seems that what I’m doing is a variant on the “Pomodoro technique” (and probably quite a few others). The differences being that I prefer 45 minutes, I think that’s a better chunk of time to get things moving, and I like a physical aspects of a sand glass timer and an abacus. I perhaps should add that when I was doing intense memorisation study before an exam I’d use a 20 minutes on 10-20 minutes off cycle as that matches human memory performance better. But for general tasks 45 minutes seems good to me.
Here’s my method: (+8 for me)
I have a 45 minute sand glass timer and a simple abacus on my desk. Each row on the abacus corresponds to one type of activity that I could be doing, e.g. writing, studying, coding, emails and surfing,… First, I decide what type of activity I’d like to do and then start the 45 minute sand glass. I then do that kind of activity until it ends. At which point I count it on my abacus and have at least a 5 minute break. There are no rules about what I have to do, I do what ever I want. But I always do it in focused 45 minute units.
If you try this, do it exactly as I describe, at least to start with, as there are reasons for each of the elements. Let me explain some of them. Firstly the use of a physical timer and abacus. Having them sitting on your desk in view makes them a lot more effective than using something like a digital timer and spreadsheet on your computer. When you look up you see the sand running out. When you take a break you see a colourful physical bar graph of your time allocation—it’s there looking at you.
45 minutes is important because it’s long enough to get a reasonable amount done if you work in a focused way, but it’s short enough not to be discouraging, unlike an hour. Even with something I don’t particularly want to do, sitting down and doing just 45 minutes of it is a bearable concept, knowing that at the end I’ll have a break and then do something else if I want to. Also if you look at human mental performance, it doesn’t make much sense trying to do more than 45 minutes hard work at a time. Better to have a break for 5 to 15 minutes and then start again. As I think 15 minute breaks are essential, at the end of the week the total number of units counted on my abacus are my total number of at-work-activity hours for the week.
Having no rule about what you have to do is also important. If you put rules in place you will start avoiding using the system. The only thing is that when you start a unit of 45 minutes you have to go through with it. But you’re free not to start one if you don’t want to. You might then think that you’d always just do the kind of work that you like doing, rather than units of the stuff you avoid but should be doing. Interestingly, no, indeed often I find that the reverse starts to happen, even though I’m not really aiming for that. The reason is the principle that what you measure and keep in mind you naturally tend to control. Thus you don’t actually need any rules, in fact they are harmful as they make you dislike and avoid the system.
Another force at work is that momentum often builds enthusiasm. Thus you think that you’ll just do 45 minutes on some project due in a week that you’d rather not be doing at all, and after that unit of time you actually feel like doing another one just to finish some part of it off.
So yeah, the only real rule is that when the sand glass is running you have to stay hard at work on the task, which isn’t too bad as it’s only so many minutes more before you’re taking a break and once again free.
UPDATE: So it seems that what I’m doing is a variant on the “Pomodoro technique” (and probably quite a few others). The differences being that I prefer 45 minutes, I think that’s a better chunk of time to get things moving, and I like a physical aspects of a sand glass timer and an abacus. I perhaps should add that when I was doing intense memorisation study before an exam I’d use a 20 minutes on 10-20 minutes off cycle as that matches human memory performance better. But for general tasks 45 minutes seems good to me.