Here's a variant I used successfully to deal with a complex project that was in danger of ratholing. The concept is "Tabata for work", if you're familiar with t

Here's a variant I used successfully to deal with a complex project that was in danger of ratholing. The concept is "Tabata for work", if you're familiar with the Tabata principles, but it's basically just pomodoro with a twist. PDF: http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/39_05_Tabata_My_Job.pdf http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/39_05_Tabata_My_Job.pdf Instead of, say, 20-minutes-on-5-minutes-off-20-minutes-on the same work, the idea is to divvy up a series of tasks and work on each of them for one Tabata sprint. Ten minutes, with five minutes to enjoy yourself between tasks. Over two hours, you cover eight separate tasks. It's also really surprising what you can get done in ten minutes; send a certain set of emails, review a document, re-work a spreadsheet, test an app. I would not recommend it for coding, for obvious reasons, but if you are in more of a product management role where you are juggling cats and need a structured system to help you deal with all the cats, this definitely worked for me. It also helped with prioritisation because after spending 10 minutes on each sub-project, it was easy to see what would need more attention that day and have a better idea of how long it would take. The only drawback is that sometimes I really did need a little more than ten minutes (I experimented with some 20 minute blocks, but interruptions became more of an issue).