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Pomodoro. It trains you to stay on task for 25 minutes at a time, and evaluate how you did during the last cycle, both from a distraction standpoint and a chasing-your-tail standpoint.

Over time you build up to 4.5-6 hours of solid, head-down coding a day.

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The pomodoro technique helped me enormously. I don't follow it strictly, I just set the timer and focused on one task until timer is done. I never worked the duration up, I still just do 25 minutes or less. I even put websurfing in a 25 min bucket, then stop.

I ended up learning how infrequent real emergencies pop up. Which in turn, got me to stop looking at my phone at red lights.

I gotta admit, this sounds awful. Adding more mental overhead to your everyday habits sounds like it'd just make things worse.

on the contrary, you just point at the countdown timer and half your problems go away, literally.

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