My favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25 minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do other

My favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25 minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do other things, e.g. answer texts - then rinse and repeat. Do this 6-8 times and you'll have done more than most people do in a full work day. When I first heard of it I was very skeptical of it, because I know that as a programmer I need hours of uninterrupted focus, so purposely interrupting myself every 25 mins seemed counterproductive. But it turns out, most of us get micro-interruptions all the time, and they're much easier to ignore if you know that in at most 25 mins, you'll have 5 mins to deal with them. That way you don't create 5 mins of interruption, you batch the already existing interruptions together and timebox them. And 5 mins isn't enough to get you out of 'the zone' as long as you keep the breaks mentally 'light' - and going for a little walk really is healthier than just sitting all the time. And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about, because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school. A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that way.