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Pomodoro always felt so strange to me. If I could just "start" things on command, I wouldn't need any of these special techniques in the first place. And if I d

Pomodoro always felt so strange to me. If I could just "start" things on command, I wouldn't need any of these special techniques in the first place. And if I do work, I absolutely don't want to stop, and certainly not because a clock tells me so. It's like the perfect antipattern to destroy any productivity in me. Not hating, just puzzled by it.

notso411 3y ago
Reminds me of where I used to work everything was a “technique” or a “practice” or a “theorem”. Just… work.
FaridIO 3y ago
This is exactly how I feel about it. I'm sure there are some tasks it works really well for, but I have yet to encounter one.
willsmith72 3y ago
I find it extremely useful. It's a reminder to take breaks and keeps me focused. I don't use it all day every day. Some days when I don't use it I end up working for many hours without a break, and my productivity would've been higher with regular breaks. I also find myself drifting to tasks which seem important but aren't, like a random refactor. Pomo helps me be conscious every half hour about what I want to work on If you don't have those problems, it probably won't offer you anything
coldblues 3y ago
I recommend FocusMate. You are forced to work by the social pressure of having someone else on the other end work alongside you.
- contctlink 3y ago
  What do you mean by social pressure ?
  - 57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago
    Your search term is 'body-doubling', where you feel like a slacker if someone is watching you not hustle while they hustle.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Ah just like peer pressure? I've seen that also in sports where you have a virtual co-runner you try to keep to up with. It doesn't work for me though because I'm really independent and totally not competitive. I just don't care about my peers. I hate team sports also for this case because I'll always get kicked out for not caring about the team's goals. It's a bit difficult sometimes because all companies think they only need 'team players'. I can be extremely loyal to people I care about but I need to build up that care naturally, them being part of some arbitrary 'team' doesn't work for me. Hard to explain :)
- willmacdonald 3y ago
  Thanks for mentioning FocusMate! I used it many years ago, but had since forgotten it's name. No amount of googling found it.
  - eggdaft 3y ago
    Aside: this is exactly the kind of query that ChatGPT is so good at. If you haven’t tried “I’m trying to remember the name of this thing…” please could you see if it works?
chrchr 3y ago
The part of pomodoro that's supposed to help you start is the limited time period. Many people find it much easier to undertake something if they know it's only for 25 minutes. If 25 minutes still seems daunting, by all means pick a lower number.
- itronitron 3y ago
  This is why I have never even considered pomodoro. Only being able to work on something for 25 minutes for me means it's not worth starting in the first place.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    The idea's not that you're done for good when the 25min are up. You just take a break. Then you come back to it for another 25min. Maybe you do this for the entire day, maybe you do this a couple times for an entire week. Or longer, I've had projects that stretch over a couple of years, that I rarely spent more than 1-3 hours of any particular day on. In practice I'll happily ignore the "take a 5 min break" part of the Pomodoro method but I definitely take real breaks every hour or two.
  - RandallBrown 3y ago
    I don't think there's any reason you can't just continue the task you've been working on.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Takes a good half hour to get back into what you're doing in my experience. You may get something done in that period, but it's not quality.
      - funcDropShadow 3y ago
        On the contrary, when I walk around my home in those small pomodoro breaks, I often have similar small epiphanies that people describe when going to the coffee machine in the office.
tetha 3y ago
For me the hardest part is actually getting started. And as I notice, my problem at times is that my tasks are like "You are a Roman General. You have 3 Legions. Conquer Europe north of this line." For me personally, it's better to have a task like "Alternate pick the A-Minor scale on the bass 2 times up and down at 120bpm". Easy and simple to do I'd say. And then you realize that other thing. And then that other thing. And then you watch some Vids from Ola, Bernth, Glenn. And suddenly you've noodled 2 hours on the guitar.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  > And as I notice, my problem at times is that my tasks are like "You are a Roman General. You have 3 Legions. Conquer Europe north of this line." Since we all know how this goes, I would say procrastination is a survival instinct.
TheHideout 3y ago
There is this idea of thinking fast and slow aka the hare brain and tortoise mind. I use the active time for the hare (fast thinking), and the break time for the tortoise to pass up ideas from the subconscious (slow thinking). I've been using pomodoro for many years. Not continuously though because I find that my productivity level is extremely high while doing it and I start to get burned out because the intermittent breaks are not enough. You might be interested in something called the domino technique to help with getting started / getting into flow. Basically you do something that is difficult but short that you can do to get a meaningful psychological "win" in a short period of time (5 minutes) to kick start your motivation / flow. I would post a link but I don't have a good reference on hand.
dkarl 3y ago
> If I could just "start" things on command, I wouldn't need any of these special techniques in the first place For me, it's the opposite. This is one of my favorite things about doing pomodoros. I hate to be the tactibro who sources inspirational quotes from special forces influencers, but I worked with a guy who introduced me to the phrase "go before you're ready," and I really took it to heart as a check against my natural tendency to leave problems alone and wait for them to get easier. I got this tendency from studying math in school, where I fell in love with the magic of getting stuck on a hard problem, putting it aside, and having the solution come to me hours later while I was thinking about something else. That approach works when my subconscious has everything it needs to work on the problem, like when writing proofs for a math class, but at my job I'm usually working in a different way, where the solution depends on concrete details that I'm in the process of learning, such as a new part of a codebase, a new library, a new API, etc. I can't delegate that kind of work to my subconscious, because my subconscious isn't going to read documentation and write exploratory code. But my brain keeps whispering, "You're stuck. Take a break." Because of this, I love the "go before you're ready" aspect of doing Pomodoros.
- kristiandupont 3y ago
  Hah, that's exactly what I do, I can see that clearly now but I hadn't articulated it. Thank you!
- malfist 3y ago
  "Go before you're ready" is such a brilliant reframing. I'm going to start using it. 90% of my inability to start something is procrastinating because I don't know the full picture yet, but every time I get started I figure it out. Just have to go before you're ready
hinkley 3y ago
The brain likes to defend itself, and it likes symmetry. It's just as likely that the reason you hate stopping is because your subconscious is trying to protect you from the minor catastrophe that is starting back up again. People used to being interrupted either get nothing done or weave practices into their routine that help them remember where they left off. Used to be when I was young and an enthusiastic proponent of Flow state (neither of which are true anymore), I would pretty confidently pull on threads until I had six or seven things on my todo list, and manage to almost always remember all of them. But these are moderately large rewrites pretending to be refactoring by misusing the tools and ignoring the goals and values. So these days I tend to use that mental model to do more reading and trying to get closer to the crux of the issue instead of starting to type and hoping for my brain to catch up with my fingers within a few dozen lines of code, which isn't happening if we've arrived at the adjective "large". I haven't articulated this before so I don't really have a handy list of all of the tools and tricks I utilize for this, but I can say that conditional breakpoints are one of the ways I augment that memory. Even if I get pulled off into a production issue, these breakpoints are a much better reminder of what I was thinking about than a simple breakpoint.
lightbendover 3y ago
Engineering crushing stress from existential threats of my own creation is just about the only productivity trick I have. It works at least.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  It probably is the most effective cure for procrastination.
chudi 3y ago
One of the best parts about Pomodoro it's that the few first session for me are about struggling with the anxiety that the work gives me. The idea behind is that the anxiety peaks and drops off rapidly in the first or second period, so just thinking that battling against the anxiety is actually work and time boxing it achieves great results
a-saleh 3y ago
Yeah, I get that. But it does sometimes genuinely help. Sometimes it is mostly a trick to get me started (ok, I need to do this only for $n minutes, I could do that) and then I ignore the pause, because the clock is not the boss of me and I am in the flow
escapedmoose 3y ago
Being stopped is a huge benefit of Pomodoro for me. It gives the brain a cooldown period to back out of stupid decisions/patterns, and to connect pieces that it wasn’t necessarily focusing on. It’s amazing the silly mistakes I’ll catch myself in, or the sudden revelations I’ll have, after coming back from tinkering with a LEGO set for 10 min.

notso411 3y ago

Reminds me of where I used to work everything was a “technique” or a “practice” or a “theorem”. Just… work.

FaridIO 3y ago

This is exactly how I feel about it. I'm sure there are some tasks it works really well for, but I have yet to encounter one.

willsmith72 3y ago

I find it extremely useful. It's a reminder to take breaks and keeps me focused. I don't use it all day every day. Some days when I don't use it I end up working for many hours without a break, and my productivity would've been higher with regular breaks. I also find myself drifting to tasks which seem important but aren't, like a random refactor. Pomo helps me be conscious every half hour about what I want to work on If you don't have those problems, it probably won't offer you anything

coldblues 3y ago

I recommend FocusMate. You are forced to work by the social pressure of having someone else on the other end work alongside you.

contctlink 3y ago
What do you mean by social pressure ?
- 57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago
  Your search term is 'body-doubling', where you feel like a slacker if someone is watching you not hustle while they hustle.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Ah just like peer pressure? I've seen that also in sports where you have a virtual co-runner you try to keep to up with. It doesn't work for me though because I'm really independent and totally not competitive. I just don't care about my peers. I hate team sports also for this case because I'll always get kicked out for not caring about the team's goals. It's a bit difficult sometimes because all companies think they only need 'team players'. I can be extremely loyal to people I care about but I need to build up that care naturally, them being part of some arbitrary 'team' doesn't work for me. Hard to explain :)
willmacdonald 3y ago
Thanks for mentioning FocusMate! I used it many years ago, but had since forgotten it's name. No amount of googling found it.
- eggdaft 3y ago
  Aside: this is exactly the kind of query that ChatGPT is so good at. If you haven’t tried “I’m trying to remember the name of this thing…” please could you see if it works?

chrchr 3y ago

The part of pomodoro that's supposed to help you start is the limited time period. Many people find it much easier to undertake something if they know it's only for 25 minutes. If 25 minutes still seems daunting, by all means pick a lower number.

itronitron 3y ago
This is why I have never even considered pomodoro. Only being able to work on something for 25 minutes for me means it's not worth starting in the first place.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  The idea's not that you're done for good when the 25min are up. You just take a break. Then you come back to it for another 25min. Maybe you do this for the entire day, maybe you do this a couple times for an entire week. Or longer, I've had projects that stretch over a couple of years, that I rarely spent more than 1-3 hours of any particular day on. In practice I'll happily ignore the "take a 5 min break" part of the Pomodoro method but I definitely take real breaks every hour or two.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  I don't think there's any reason you can't just continue the task you've been working on.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Takes a good half hour to get back into what you're doing in my experience. You may get something done in that period, but it's not quality.
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      On the contrary, when I walk around my home in those small pomodoro breaks, I often have similar small epiphanies that people describe when going to the coffee machine in the office.

tetha 3y ago

For me the hardest part is actually getting started. And as I notice, my problem at times is that my tasks are like "You are a Roman General. You have 3 Legions. Conquer Europe north of this line." For me personally, it's better to have a task like "Alternate pick the A-Minor scale on the bass 2 times up and down at 120bpm". Easy and simple to do I'd say. And then you realize that other thing. And then that other thing. And then you watch some Vids from Ola, Bernth, Glenn. And suddenly you've noodled 2 hours on the guitar.

funcDropShadow 3y ago
> And as I notice, my problem at times is that my tasks are like "You are a Roman General. You have 3 Legions. Conquer Europe north of this line." Since we all know how this goes, I would say procrastination is a survival instinct.

TheHideout 3y ago

There is this idea of thinking fast and slow aka the hare brain and tortoise mind. I use the active time for the hare (fast thinking), and the break time for the tortoise to pass up ideas from the subconscious (slow thinking). I've been using pomodoro for many years. Not continuously though because I find that my productivity level is extremely high while doing it and I start to get burned out because the intermittent breaks are not enough. You might be interested in something called the domino technique to help with getting started / getting into flow. Basically you do something that is difficult but short that you can do to get a meaningful psychological "win" in a short period of time (5 minutes) to kick start your motivation / flow. I would post a link but I don't have a good reference on hand.

dkarl 3y ago

> If I could just "start" things on command, I wouldn't need any of these special techniques in the first place For me, it's the opposite. This is one of my favorite things about doing pomodoros. I hate to be the tactibro who sources inspirational quotes from special forces influencers, but I worked with a guy who introduced me to the phrase "go before you're ready," and I really took it to heart as a check against my natural tendency to leave problems alone and wait for them to get easier. I got this tendency from studying math in school, where I fell in love with the magic of getting stuck on a hard problem, putting it aside, and having the solution come to me hours later while I was thinking about something else. That approach works when my subconscious has everything it needs to work on the problem, like when writing proofs for a math class, but at my job I'm usually working in a different way, where the solution depends on concrete details that I'm in the process of learning, such as a new part of a codebase, a new library, a new API, etc. I can't delegate that kind of work to my subconscious, because my subconscious isn't going to read documentation and write exploratory code. But my brain keeps whispering, "You're stuck. Take a break." Because of this, I love the "go before you're ready" aspect of doing Pomodoros.

kristiandupont 3y ago
Hah, that's exactly what I do, I can see that clearly now but I hadn't articulated it. Thank you!
malfist 3y ago
"Go before you're ready" is such a brilliant reframing. I'm going to start using it. 90% of my inability to start something is procrastinating because I don't know the full picture yet, but every time I get started I figure it out. Just have to go before you're ready

hinkley 3y ago

The brain likes to defend itself, and it likes symmetry. It's just as likely that the reason you hate stopping is because your subconscious is trying to protect you from the minor catastrophe that is starting back up again. People used to being interrupted either get nothing done or weave practices into their routine that help them remember where they left off. Used to be when I was young and an enthusiastic proponent of Flow state (neither of which are true anymore), I would pretty confidently pull on threads until I had six or seven things on my todo list, and manage to almost always remember all of them. But these are moderately large rewrites pretending to be refactoring by misusing the tools and ignoring the goals and values. So these days I tend to use that mental model to do more reading and trying to get closer to the crux of the issue instead of starting to type and hoping for my brain to catch up with my fingers within a few dozen lines of code, which isn't happening if we've arrived at the adjective "large". I haven't articulated this before so I don't really have a handy list of all of the tools and tricks I utilize for this, but I can say that conditional breakpoints are one of the ways I augment that memory. Even if I get pulled off into a production issue, these breakpoints are a much better reminder of what I was thinking about than a simple breakpoint.

lightbendover 3y ago

Engineering crushing stress from existential threats of my own creation is just about the only productivity trick I have. It works at least.

Apocryphon 3y ago
It probably is the most effective cure for procrastination.

chudi 3y ago

One of the best parts about Pomodoro it's that the few first session for me are about struggling with the anxiety that the work gives me. The idea behind is that the anxiety peaks and drops off rapidly in the first or second period, so just thinking that battling against the anxiety is actually work and time boxing it achieves great results

a-saleh 3y ago

Yeah, I get that. But it does sometimes genuinely help. Sometimes it is mostly a trick to get me started (ok, I need to do this only for $n minutes, I could do that) and then I ignore the pause, because the clock is not the boss of me and I am in the flow

escapedmoose 3y ago

Being stopped is a huge benefit of Pomodoro for me. It gives the brain a cooldown period to back out of stupid decisions/patterns, and to connect pieces that it wasn’t necessarily focusing on. It’s amazing the silly mistakes I’ll catch myself in, or the sudden revelations I’ll have, after coming back from tinkering with a LEGO set for 10 min.