Pomodoro

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system designed to assist students with their studies through intervals of intense focus followed by short breaks.

The original steps for the technique are:

Choose a task
Set a timer for 25 minutes
Focus on the task until the timer is up
Take a short 10 minute break
Loop to 1 for four times
After four loops, take a thirty minute break

My experience has been the Pomodoro as written is horrible for "flow" work, but an excellent tool for forcing yourself into completing repetitive or frustrating tasks. If you find yourself falling into a flow state, abandon the timer and simply work until completed.

I have also found that much longer Pomodoros and breaks are useful for structuring a work day as a remote developer. An 8 hour work day can be broken into four 90 minute Pomodoros with four 30 minute breaks. The Pomodoros are for deep focused programming, while the breaks are used to respond to slack, e-mail, meetings, planning, conducting online research and other "distracted" tasks. This gives you six hours of development in a work day, two hours covering everything else, and enough time during each Pomodoro to get into a proper flow state.

My preferred digital timer is Pomatez¹, version 1.3+ supports 90 minute Pomodoros and works well across platforms.

External References

Montilla, Roldan Jr. Pomatez <https://zidoro.github.io/pomatez/>. Retrieved 23T11.

Linked References

code-reviews
Some good practices Schorer points out are creating checklists of common items, setting a [[pomodoro]] timer to dedicate time to the practice of review, checking for duplication of behaviors, and checking for places where a developer might misunderstand the underlying nature of existing models.
code-reviews
Schroer abbreviates this as LGTM. The act of simply rubber stamping all code that passes through review in order to avoid conflict or digress from other duties. The counter to this, is to use the [[pomodoro]] technique to set asside a dedicated period of time to really look at the code.
personal-productivity-practices
- [[Pomodoro]]