I just use a slacker version of Pomodoro. First: in the morning, I decide what things I would like to try do today, and make some checkboxes in my notebook - s

I just use a slacker version of Pomodoro. First: in the morning, I decide what things I would like to try do today, and make some checkboxes in my notebook - some of these are boxes representing a half hour of work on a larger project, some of these are boxes representing shopping lists, I know which is which. Unlike the Pomodoro method I am not deciding exactly what I am going to do today, so it's okay if I have several more half-hour boxes than I know I can complete in a day. Second: I do things. I don't pull out the timer, I just do things, and take breaks between them. The time I spent originally using the timer developed a pretty decent sense for a half hour of work, so I'll often find myself saying "how long have I been working on this project" and checking Time Sink's window at around a half an hour. Maybe I'll get up and take a serious break, maybe I'll blow it off. At some point I'll probably be climbing on my bike to go between my home and the various cafes/parks I work in so I've got a decent amount of "get off my ass and focus on something further than 4' away" built into my life. I'll check off time blocks in the notebook as I get a chance. I also keep running time track charts in my working files, I'm an artist and it's nice to pull up a finished piece months later and say "this took me 5h spread out over a week" when thinking about future prices, or to look at the time spent on a half-finished piece and think about how much more time I have on the clock before (agreed-upon price)/(hours worked) drops too low, and maybe stop obsessing over an area that's acceptable but not great to go make sure every other part of the piece is going to be acceptable before I run out of time. Third: repeat every work day for the rest of your life. This works for me as a freelance artist. Sometimes I get sick and don't do this. Sometimes I get depressed and don't do this. Sometimes if I've stopped doing this for a while I'll take out the physical timer and start doing a more serious Pomodoro Routine to kind of reset myself. But really as a general rule I don't need the whole formal procedure.