Wow, that sounds optimal. But if you have impaired executive functioning, that strategy becomes hard to the point of probably impossible. I've got ADHD, so whi

Wow, that sounds optimal. But if you have impaired executive functioning, that strategy becomes hard to the point of probably impossible. I've got ADHD, so while I don't expect 8 hours of productive work from myself, if left to my own sense of "focus" and "discipline", I'm lucky to get 20 minutes in. If I'm emotionally or intellectually invested in something, time loses all meaning. And when the only work to be done lacks that pull, I inevitably get drawn to things which are either not work, or are only tangentially work related and get lost in that for hours at a time, even though it didn't feel that way. I can get lost in breaks too. I make up for it by eventually getting that "oh shit" feeling and hammering everything out in the early hours of the morning when there is nobody online to distract me. The downside to that though is I end up staring at a screen too long, forgetting to eat or drink, and sometimes making myself physically ill from it all. So pomodoro gives me a great balance. I write down one task to do, start my timer (in this case I use an instrumental soundtrack that goes 25 minutes) and when the music is done, get up, drink water and have a snack (I try to avoid browsing the internet) and get back to it (I don't use the 5 minute break timer, which is sometimes a problem, but if my mind is hooked into my work by then I'm usually eager to get back to it). The other big benefit of pomodoro is that I can use the first session for planning the other sessions, and that is a great way to plan and prioritize for the day without going overboard and spending 2 hours making a to do list that is too long anyhow. Also if I didn't write out what I was doing every day (even if it's written out somewhere else like JIRA) I would just straight up forget when I come back from a break and have to replan it all out again in my head (which would probably be forgotten again). Pomodoro also helped me get better at shifting contexts, so since most meetings start on the hour, or half-hour, it doesn't feel like a huge interruption to stop anymore (though I find it's good to have a post-meeting pomodoro session that's half "write down what the heck that was about" and half "give your brain an extra break because meetings are hard".) So yeah, I need a timer. I agree that you don't the overhead of applications at all though. Pen and paper and timed soundtrack (or actual physical tomato timer which used to be something people had just laying around) keeps it dead simple.