It's a shame that the article doesn't mention the word "pomodoro". But as time blocks become short enough they work better as todo items. Instead of "clean the kitchen" it just becomes "clean the kitchen for 25 minutes". It's a different attitude than "clean till done", but more of a different constraint on a todo list than a replacement.
Pomodoro also fits in well with dealing with ergonomic issues in desk work. Sitting too long can be bad for you. Some try to fix that with standing desks, but standing too long is also bad--you are just trading one set of problems for another.
Here's an article about that [1] from the Cornell ergonomics lab. Here's their recommentation:
> Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 8 minutes AND MOVE for 2 minutes. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and stand and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation through the muscles. And movement is FREE! Research shows that you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks) to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient. So build in a pattern of creating greater movement variety in the workplace (e.g. walk to a printer, water fountain, stand for a meeting, take the stairs, walk around the floor, park a bit further away from the building each day)
If you use something like Pomodoro, then your breaks between intervals fall right into the recommended times to stand and move around.
Pomodoro is probably the closest I've come to having a technique I can stick with, although it never lasts more than a week or two (neither does any habit of mine, except the bad ones of course). I do find the default 25 min to be laughably short though -- when I'm in a Pomo phase I usually set it to 60 minutes w/ 15 min break.
I’m very busy in my job, and context switch a lot, with many short meetings a day. I would love to timebox my tasks on my calendar, but have always failed to stick with it. I even tried sunsama recently which was promising but the overall performance of that app is abysmal so I gave up.
Who has successfully shifted from scattered to disciplined task execution with time boxing? Any tips?
Founder of Sunsama here. Just wanted to chime in to say that we've basically rebuilt the product from the ground up over the past 6 months to make sure things are fast and reliable.
sometimes I think I should time block so I could make guaranteed progress on certain projects... the problem is that much of my day is spent working on tasks that are impossible to estimate the duration of. example: fixing a bug. it could take anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 days.
The Pomodoro method says to block out X(small) time to work on your task. Then you switch to another task. If the first task was not done you schedule another time block, not necessarily sequentially. You are basically iterating on larger tasks. It’s a way to motivate yourself to start on tasks and to keep you from spending more time than necessary on a task.
[edit “pomodoro” has a lot of o’s]
We're a bootstrapped team of 2. We don't find people thinking like this. It was a question. I answered in the affirmative.
We have bet all our savings on saying a bold YES to this question. I think we have the right to comment here. We've spent a good 15 months thinking about this problem.
We've read a ton of material. From the Principles of Product Development Flow to Joel Spolsky's article on Evidence-based Scheduling, distilling everything down into our product.
When you make something, and run into trouble finding early adopters, I'd like to hear all your thoughts on self-promotion.
