Pomodoro for Success

One of the most annoying ADHD superpowers is many ADHDer’s are able to easily adapt to new techniques and systems, but that nothing seems to work forever.

In one of the many ADHD books I have read recently, there was a specific callout that the brain craves novelty so much that it’s healthier to expect routines to work for a limited time. The recommendation was to give yourself a lot of grace for when your habits start to fall apart and instead use the flexibility to pick up something new, or old to keep evolving your system.

This post, as you can imagine from the title and preamble, is about my on and off again relationship with Pomodoro timers.

I found that calendar time boxing for tasks does not work for me at all as my brain refuses to participate in events that are not actually appointments. However, I love the sound of a clicking clock; the repetition, the steady click that sometimes syncs up with my music, and other times slides out in an syncopated mash.

If you have followed me long enough you would know this is the third article I have written about the Pomodoro Technique™ and how amazing it works for me… some of the time.

This time let’s start off with talking about when using timers and focus blocks works best for me.

When I Use the Timer

I have three cases where I use the timer, and sometimes these overlap.

1. I want (on need) to sit down and focus to complete tasks.
2. I don’t want to lose too much time to hyperfocus
3. I want to apply time pressure to a task that doesn’t normally have it

The Focus

It’s not a given I want to focus, in fact, it’s more a given that I really don’t want to focus on anything. I want to ping pong all around until I hit something that triggers my hyper focus and then I will do that until I am dehydrated and weirdly fatigued because I haven’t moved for hours.

But sometimes my work requires me to spend several weeks importing, linking, & then unifying entire existing AWS regions into Terraform… you know… the riveting work. We all have some sort of work that is exciting like when we write interesting code or build things, and when we need to pour over vendor contracts and invoices to build a report for the CTO.

During these times breaking things down into 2hr max blocks and then starting a work/break timer helps build up momentum, get moving, and get stuff done. Because most of my work is back to engineering focus is key to delivering and feeling good about what I did in a day.

Hyper Focus Control

And even when I am working on something exciting and engaging, not taking breaks is simply bad for our health. I want to get up and move around, do some squats, meditate to keep my mental battery up, and drink a lot of water since I live in a desert!

By keeping the timer in my eye line and using something that will be very loud and alarm for a long time BUT also auto-continues, causes me to even derail out of a hyper focus just long enough to take care of the body and mind before I jump back in. I find that when i am using 50/10 no matter how engaged (or not) I am it still feels like enough time “in the flow” and the break is short enough that it feels like popping up up for a quick breath before getting back into it.

The Time Pressure (aka My Workday)

The most common way I use the time pressure of it is during work.

I start my workday with routine. I sit down and run down a personal checklist of reviewing all of my inputs like slack, email, & github. I also review what I have on all of my lists and what is being added to those lists.

This is a perfect place for me to a timer because I like to challenge myself to parse through and note down all of the inputs I need to reply to or deal with in half of a 50 minute timer. I treat this phase much like clearing an inbox, touch everything once, figure out what needs to happen, don’t do it, but put it on a list or delegate it or whatever.

Sometimes this can take a full 50 minute timer because I had a long weekend or a lot of things happened at work overnight for me. I work in a global company where most of my coworkers are in either the EMEA or East Aisa timezones, and those are not the time zones I work in, so I have to process everything that’s happened at everybody’s yesterday on top of any days I had off but they didn’t because our holidays don’t even line up.

But I want to make sure this never takes more than that 50 timer. So I challenge myself to get through it.

At the end of this block I set up the day’s pomodoro. When I am committing to nothing but focus work I can do up to 14 blocks or appx 6 hours of focus work. I like to stick to the OG method here where I list out all my bigger tasks with estimates based on the 25m (or half of one of my actual time blocks) and I keep my tasks cut down to max of 4 timers or appx two hours. I also put all of my smaller tasks into a “Batch blocks”

Then I have this big list of things to do with estimates. Both my “return to neutral” tasks and also my project work. Now I can attack each of these time blocks in 50/10 on off timers and try to meet or beat my estimates.

Once the 50 timer is going I want to try to get what I am working on done IN that block. I don’t want a lil dangling task, or to have to go into more blocks. I am not the type to cut corners for stuff like this but it does mean I can’t sit and dwell on my decisions more than necessary and I am focused on getting a deliverable out in that timer. A lot of this time this starts to look like me redefining the task mid flight, sometimes I will shrink the scope of and break it down into a smaller unit so I can get that done in the timer, and make the new next step a another discreet task.

The more I do this the better I get at making smaller units of work for myself, which makes ADHD brain happy on so many different levels. I get more things to “done”, I check off more boxes, and everybody prefers a smaller PR to review. Not everybody likes stacked PRs, but sometimes you get poke your coworkers to give you a quick check off.

When I Don’t Use a Timer

This is the easiest section to write and is probably just a list

1. I have a lot of meetings/appointments in the day
2. I am talking to somebody (actively or passively).
3. Incidents are derailing the day.
4. I want some unfocused meandering.
5. I am ok with hyperfocusing till it’s 1am (weekends are for me).

A lot of these boil down to the idea that if I don’t have the time to focus for at least an hour at a time, I don’t bother. Sometimes at the end of the day I will do a 25/5 timer just to close things out, but otherwise I need to have the time available without rejecting other important responsibilities.

When I Wished I Used a Timer

Sometimes when my meds have lapsed and I just can’t find the energy to hit start… it happens and it’s important that we give ourselves grace when our health or minds need a break from grinding things out at max clip.¹

When I Fall off the Wagon

I can usually keep this going for a few years on my best, but burnout and fatigue hit us all at some point. When the time tracking falls off because my position has changed, or my direction isn’t clear, or I can’t summon the energy to keep going… I don’t.

I put the timers away, usually for 6 months, maybe even a year…

But I keep coming back to the one time technique that has worked for me since I first got into doing knowledge work and needed to both track and control my own time and energy.

tl;dr

This is your reminder that…

Pomodoro Technique™ has some important elements people like to forget…

1. Plan out your time blocks for the day/week in advance
2. Set up each block to have an estimate no more than 4 blocks/2hour
3. If you have a bunch of smaller things set up “batch blocks”
4. Log your actual vs estimate to get a view of your day and how long tasks take
5. When you have time at the end of a timer and the task is done, clean things up, reset to neutral.

…and some things you should be more flexible with like how big your blocks are;

• 50/10 works amazing for me
• 25/5 is low energy or filler for me
• 75/15 would be even more powerful
• 90/30 is supposedly the “optimal” according to somebody on the internet but idk about that

and my own personal hacks are;

• Use bigger ones when starting out, smoller ones when all tired at the end
• Lean into the time pressure by using a timer that automatically progresses from focus->break->focus without intervention
• Set your timer to tick when in focus, silent on break
• Keep the timer somewhere in your eyeline
• Sometimes I find I can reduce something enough (or misestimated something) so that I am suddenly in a “batch block” and I can pull in a bunch of smaller tasks till the timer resets!
• Be flexible with your blocks as your day evolves, rescope them, cut them, grow them, suddenly do a batch block.

…but if planning things out isn’t for you but you still want to use timers to challenge yourself;

1. Choose what things you are going to focus on for the time period
2. Start a stopwatch and focus on a single task
3. Stop the timer when you get distracted or finish
4. Take the time you focused, divide by 5, then take a break like that.
5. Start again and see how long you can go!

P.S. What Timer Do I Use?

I have a physical TimeTimer clock for some cases but lately I mostly use the PomoFocus website because it is usable with an absolute minimum configuration, no login required, and has auto-progression.