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Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to practice a similar technique where I take a break every hour (or two at most) for my health, and I find it very difficult to concentrate and get things done. My peak concentration is usually right before break and after break it's generally gone. I find I need multiple hours undisturbed to really get going on any substantial task. Tasks take way longer to complete with forced breaks, especially if the breaks are longer. I was hoping someone would have a way to optimize this experience. The article glosses over it, but I've been doing this now for two years also and it hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse. I really can't imagine doing 25 minute sessions. I'm quite certain that would lead to productivity asymptotic to zero. Anyone have any suggestions on how to improve this?

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You might enjoy reading the section, "Intensely Single-Task," in this article, Philip Guo's "How to Be Effective."

http://pgbovine.net/productivity-tips.htm

He also expanded that section into a full article:

http://www.pgbovine.net/intense-single-tasking.htm

Here is an excerpt I think you might find useful: "This tip has had the greatest benefit to my effectiveness: When you want to work on a task (e.g., from your to-do list), get your mind to enter a specific 'mode' where it only knows how to do that task. Forget everything else. Remain fixed in that mode until you get tired and have to "break character". Then move onto the next task and repeat."

I think it addresses: "Tasks take way longer to complete with forced breaks, especially if the breaks are longer."

mnm1 said the breaks were for health reasons, whereas that seems focused on productivity.

Ah, right: "My peak concentration is usually right before break and after break it's generally gone."

One thing I do is, before I take a break, I dump my current notes, as well as things I'd like to do, into a Google Doc. When I return from my break, I take the time to read the notes, which loads pertinent facts back into working memory and gets me back into it.

Another practice that helps is that I let a fine-grained todo list guide me during work. I make sure to explicitly mark what I am currently working on. If I get distracted, it is straightforward to remind myself what I was doing, and once I am done with it, I know exactly what I should be doing next.

I'm pretty similar - by far my most productive days are when I successfully ignore the world for hours on end. And it really doesn't matter what I'm doing, though creative work benefits the most.

When this doesn't work, it usually means I'm spinning my wheels on something and not getting anywhere. On those days I tend to set up an hourly "write down what you're doing" reminder - it's just enough of a reminder that I notice the lack of progress and switch to something else, without losing any kind of groove if things are going well.

But personally, I go to a coffee shop and get a ridiculous amount of work done, because I know I can ignore everything that happens around me. At work people ask me questions, or at home the cats celebrate my presence by knocking stuff over and then throwing up on it - anywhere else, and the only channels to reach me are async (chat/email) or high enough priority that they're worth never ignoring (phone, pagerduty, etc).

For me, I just ignore the break and set up a new 25 minutes. The 25 minutes is just to build an easily achievable target to start your "productive part of the day". If I'm in the flow state, I just cancel the 5 minute rest and do 25 minutes again.

Mostly for fun, but also to 'optimize this experience', I'm building a Pomodoro android app that adjusts work duration based on brainwave data from an EEG headband: https://github.com/NeuroTechx/neurodoro

Are you getting meaningful data from the Muse? I tried it a while ago and didn't get usable data.

Too early to tell with regards to concentration, fatigue, or any measure directly related to productivity. We can get good classification of basic eyes-closed-alpha and are hoping our ML approach (RNNs + LSTM) and enough data will carry us beyond that.

I find that pomodoro is really only helpful for when I am reluctant to do the task or where I don’t know what I’m doing to such a degree that it is helpful to expkicitly block out 20 minutes to flail at it followed by writing up the relevant questions.

My experience is that the efficacy of the Pomodoro technique depends a great deal on both user personality and type of work. It may be that the way you want to work and the things you’re working on aren’t a good fit. That’s fine.

perhaps you should break down the task into larger chunks that you could do for a few hours of intense focus and then do the pomodoro technique after lunch where you go through the motions on smaller tasks that you don't feel motivated to do?

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