I’ve been trying it out recently to some degree of success, finding the right intervals was the hard part, 25-5 feels like absolute torture to me.
Is anyone else giving it ago?
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Doesnt work for me. 25 is too long if I’m struggling, and if I start getting into it, a five minutes break spoils my flow. I’ve had more success with “I know you don’t want to do this, so let’s just do as much as we can in 10 minutes”. And sometimes ten minutes is all I need to break a tasks back (writing some email I’d been avoiding), or I kinda get into it and am fine to continue. And if I’m really stressed and just want to escape even after starting, then I go spend some time de-stressing and try something else.
I’ve tried it a few times but so far it made things worse. Knowing there is a timer running just distracts me so much. Like I want to look at it or at least I think about it all the time.
I’ve found that it destroys my hyperfocus periods, which is the only time I’m actually able to be productive, so I stopped doing it.
I don’t know how people get anything done with constant interruptions. My brain does that enough already.
Maybe only using the pause timer would work. Once you start procrastinating, start the timer, allow yourself to do whatever but once the timer is done, back to work.
Doesn’t work for me. The breaks break my focus entirely.
What did work was “if I can study for 20min, I will have studied enough for today.” Which sometimes followed with hyperfocus resulting in studying for a time. 20min or 2hours were both victories in my book.
Never heard of it. Enlighten me please.
25 mins studying, 5 min break.
Repeat 4 times and on the 4th time it’s a 35 min break.
Basically forces your brain to cool off and relax between studying time. You retain better over time but it depends on what you’re studying.
Use it for tasks you tend to put off and don’t use it for tasks you tend to hyperfocus.
Right now I mostly use it for boring time-consuming chores, otherwise I don’t bother.
I will hyperfocus when I am coding at work, so I never use it then
It helps me a lot for getting started and staying on task. I used to use the countdown timer with alarm, but now I use Windows stopwatch timer with it set to be always on top so it’s near the top right corner. Whenever I get an automatic impulse to open a distraction tab it helps me catch myself. I let it run until I notice I’m over 25 min. Then I decide to break or keep going. If I break, I set it to count up again so I see how much time I’ve spent on break. This seems to be a decent compromise for flexibility for me.
Works… sometimes. Could never really follow it, tried different versions of it(50-10, 40-20, 30-10) and results are mixed.
I would say not to focus too much on the timer , get up and walk around if you feel like so, just remember to not touch addictive stuff in the breaktime (Video game, YT, etc…).
They definitely help me stay on track. I usually spend the 25 minutes on a hyper focus activity that I get lost in and could spend hours on, and the 5 minutes on a painful task like cooking where I wouldn’t know where to start and wouldn’t begin spontaneously (the 25 minute gap gives me time to plan what to do next, and the 5 minutes of manual work gives me time to check I didn’t get sidetracked on the main task)
How long have you been trying it out for?
It may just need tweaking so it fits your goals.
Today was my first day. Gonna keep at it for a while.
Did something similar before being diagnosed and it sucked and I hated it. Too rigid to maintain focus when I actually started to focus, too many interruptions.
