After failing to follow the Pomodoro method, I’d feel irritated, frustrated, and blame myself. Soon enough, the routine would fall apart, and I’d go back to working in my usual way—without boundaries or timers.
Then I had an epiphany: focusing on the timer forces you into a battle with yourself. And since it’s hard to fight your own subconscious micro-reactions and habits, you end up frustrated. Sticking rigidly to a timer is the wrong goal. The real goal should be taking regular breaks—focus will follow naturally.
To test this idea, I created "Black Screen for Windows" — an app that forcibly blacks out my screens for a few minutes at regular intervals. Usually, that’s 3–5 minutes every 20–30 minutes.
This practice of enforced, regular breaks has not only improved my well-being but also dramatically boosted my productivity—all without the frustration. My ability to focus improved, too, with a small hack: I start with a 30-minute interval, then gradually shorten it until I find a span of time in which I can maintain clean, distraction-free focus.
I find this works better for me than the classic tier-based Pomodoro.
What do you think?
Once starting, if you’re in flow, just keep going.
Starting is usually the hardest part for me, so the pomodoro method is a nightmare, because it greats more start times. Not forcing the break if things are going well helps.
Having the window go black would drive me insane. If I’m on a train of thought and my screen blacks out, I would need a notebook to frantically write down where my head was at and what I was doing when it went black. Then I’d spend the first 10 minutes of the next block trying to get back to where I was mentally.
I thought the idea of an hourglass would be better, to try and work for at least X minutes. If things are going well, the hourglass silently ends and I could keep going. If I’m having trouble, I could see the hourglass is finished and take a break, then try again. I tried this briefly, but the sand kept getting stuck, which I found problematic. I supposed pomodoro software without an alarm would do the same thing.
It is too easy to ignore the timer, that's why I think forcing breaks is a good idea. In the app I built for this, you can remove black screen if you really want but in an inconvenient way so that it is not too easy.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RWu8eZqbwgB9zaerh/third-time...
I was a teenager with focus issues when a teacher introduced me to Pomodoro. It was great because I was finally able to get my schoolwork done (I would regularly fail 3-4 classes every year before this). The general structure he gave was as follows:
- You split time into work/rest intervals
- At the start of each work interval, you set a 15-minute timer and plan out what you are going to do in the interval
- When the timer goes off you HAVE to stop
- Then you set a 5-minute timer and rest until it goes off
- Repeat until you are done
Back then, the "planning every interval" part was hard for me but just forcing me to rest was enough to do what I needed to do. In reality, 90 minutes of homework wasn't enough to make me tired (I would go on 10-hour long programming sessions with no breaks on the regular), just emotionally tired, bored, or frustrated. The breaks solved that.
I think the timings he suggested are adjusted for younger people (15 work minutes instead of the more common 25, and no long break after N cycles). As I grew up, I slowly lengthened the work and rest periods up to 25min work and 7min rest.
The benefits of Pomodoro are Three-fold as far as I can tell:
- You plan out your work, so you spend a higher % of work time doing stuff that matters.
- You rest regularly, so you are able to keep working for longer.
- You limit rest time, so you spend a higher % of time working.
Recently, after I mentioned I use Pomodoro, one of my mentors made the observation that the interest of a paid worker is not to work as long as possible during your work hours. Instead, it's to get your work done as easily and effectively as possible, get paid (hopefully make your boss and coworkers happy, get a raise and promotion every once in a while), and get out.
Doing the math, with my flavor of Pomodoro (25/7, no long breaks) you end up working 5:30-hours out of an 8-hour workday (it's roughly 5:10 with the technique taken straight from Wikipedia). I wonder if he meant that it's possible to be very effective while working significantly less than 5 hours a day. I wonder how much I could get done in just 2 or 3 hours of fully focused work, and how I would feel about it at the end of the day.