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Useful things for those in the struggle...

Deep Work, by Cal Newport. An excellent book on how to work on really big ideas/projects effectively, without losing your humanity in the process. This is a must-read for anyone serious about work.

Pomodoro Technique. This is well-documented with lots of apps and tools online, but it's pretty simple. Set a 25 minute timer. Work, without interruption, for 25 minutes. When the timer goes off, do not-work for 5 minutes - exercise, web surf, whatever. When that timer goes off, set another 25. It's nice because it does the boundary stuff this article talks about in a manageable way. It's not "I'm going to work hard all week", but rather "I'm going to work hard for 25 minutes".

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Deep Work is maybe the first book I wanted to through out of the window in a long time. The complete book can be resumed in a sentence: "Secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state".

But of course you cannot write a full book out of one sentence, so it repeats itself until it achieves to contradict itself by telling you that if you are a writer/journalist you can achieve the state of flow in chunks of 10 minutes spread over the day and happily switch tasks.

So, no, really, you can save yourself this book.

Contrariwise, I just read and loved Deep Work: it's made me more purposeful about directing my attention, and aware of how my environment and lower desires work against this focus.

The journalistic model of doing deep work does seems different than the others, but he's not recommending it, just pointing out that there are outliers who can train themselves to reach intense focus states quickly and do deep work in short periods of time. Not sure why this would bother you -- if it doesn't apply to you, ignore it!

I felt like there was a ton of value here. Recommended for all!

Glad it helped you! In my case, as I was already exposed to the concept of being in the flow[0] while coding and the basic rule of reserving the biggest chunk of time to my most long term or important work in my day, it was a waste of time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I'm glad to have read your comment. I almost thought of buying the book.

I read "So good they can't ignore you" from the same author and was really underwhelmed by it. It came across as repetitive and formulaic (i.e. have some basic principle, then interview interesting people who employ this principle somehow).

I agree with the GP. The book just went round and round on the same topic. You'll be better off reading a summary on Blinkist or elsewhere.

I had the opposite experience. In general most self-help books do what you describe, but I thought Deep Work went into quite some detail on how to actually achieve it.

For instance the idea of how you deal with short moments of boredom in general (also outside of work) has a lot of influence on how good you are at ignoring distractions during work was an eye opener for me, and goes deeper than "secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state".

Learning to tolerate boredom again has been a real eye-opener for my own sense of self.

Any programmers here use pomodoro? I expect 25 minute interruptions would do more harm than good for my focus when writing code, especially the continuous expectation that I will be interrupted. I don’t have a pressing interest in finding productivity tips, just curious to hear about programmers who have tried this technique

I did use it for a while, because I had issues starting to work. It helped with that but like you said, 25m were not enough and the interruptions got quite annoying. I tried a 45m/10m work/pause ratio instead and it was a bit better, but I don't really use pomodoro anymore. It helped me to form a "habit of starting" though.

I think this is key. Used to do it, then didn't need it!

works well and doesn't have to be 25 minutes, it can be an hour. Experiment (test and learn)

The magic for me isn't seeing the timer as a distraction to my flow, but an enabler - that timer reminds me to go take a walk and let my "diffuse" mode thinking take over and all the sudden things start to click.

I use pomodoro and find it helps my productivity more than hinder it. Mind you I show signs of ADHD (working w/ a doc to get a diagnosis now) so pomodoro might no be for everyone but I find it allows me to slice out some time to really focus and not let myself get distracted.

When time is of the essence I simply skip the 5 minute breaks but continue to work using the pomodoro.

According to Russel Barkley (well known and central figure in the ADHD scientific community), you should definitely take short breaks every so many minutes.

He recommends 3 mins for every 10 minutes of work, but that's for children.

I think you'd want be interested in watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tpB-B8BXk0

Definitely check out his other work as well, listening to his talks is like reading my own diary... except translated to scientific language

25+5 is too short but I found 48+12 worked well. With that said usually it's just about starting, once you start it's not nearly as hard to keep going.

What I've found in using the technique is that anything lost in focus is more than made up for by insights gained during the break.

Taking your eyes off of a problem for a short time can often help you return to it with a different mindset / approach.

It's good for getting you started.

So you've become stuck. You pick something you know will be a quick job (e.g. do this one method, fix this one bug).

Then after a few podomoro you stop doing them as you get into the flow and get into the zone.

I use pomodoro but with 45 mins instead of 25. I am usually tuned to deep focus playlist on YouTube/Spotify. In the five minutes, I listen to my current favorites song for full five minutes. Every day I aim for 10 pomodoros. Earlier I was able to do 3-4 and was left unmotivated. Now I have been able to crush 10+ everyday for last eight days.

25 mins is too short for certain types of work. I find 45-50 mins of work with 10-15 min breaks works the best for me. Starting with 25 minutes is mentally easier when you are first starting a task and then once you get the hang of it you can adjust. Sometimes I would go longer because I was really in the zone.

I did pomodoro for about a month once. It was actually helping a lot. I think I got lazy after a while and stopped doing the entire stop-watch thing, thinking I would continue doing it by just looking at the clock.

I think I will try pomodoro again today and see if I can get back that juicy tomato timer goodness.

I have more or less the same experience.

I used tomato-timer.com. It’s really good.

I've found that pomodoro solves two problems.

First, 25 minute is a small, non-frightening investment of time that you CAN do; so it facilitates starting an activity.

Second, since 25 minutes is indeed a short span, the clock usually stops before you have completed the activity (meaning that you know what to do next) and also before you are tired. So after a little rest it is also easy to start another pomodoro. And so on. You keep momentum.

:raises hand: I use it!

If you have no problem with focus, perhaps you don't need it.

I've found it useful at my work (consulting/team lead) where I'm expected to be somewhat responsive to email/slack. Rather than leaving Slack/email open (rookie move, I know), I use Pomodoro (currently at 45/5) just to remind me to open them, check for new stuff, and then close them again for my next chunk of work.

I personally use 50/10/50/25 on off on off.

I tried it and had that issue. Usually break time would happen while I really needed to keep my train of thought. Now I just try to do things in smaller sessions when possible and test often. While tests are running I go for a walk.

However, I have found it to be really nice for my Japanese language study. When I come back after a break I feel any new words or concepts I was learning have solidified a little better than if I were to just keep going.

I have used it and it works quite well, for certain types of work.

The 25 is just a suggestion, a starting point. There's no reason it can't be any other number.

But in the end I lost most of the ideas of the actual Pomodoro method (e.g. if you finish your work in the first five minutes of a Pomodoro, you still have to spend the twenty minutes left on improving what you did, no switching tasks within a Pomodoro -- I don't do that), what's left is just setting a timer and staying concentrated for that long. That works well for me.

What's hard is keeping the breaks short. I often start procrastinating during them and then only start the next Pomodoro much later.

There's a phone app / browser extension called "Forest" that's nice, you can set a timer and add a tree to a forest if you manage to stay off the phone / away from bad websites for that long, and add a dead tree to your forest if you failed.

My biggest problem I have with deep work is not that it makes undoubtedly sense and leads to interesting results but to find what to work on. I can't find my deep work. Finding a niche and sticking to it is much harder than performing deep work.

honest question, why does this get downvoted?

Beats me. I mostly get downvoted for violating the political status quo of "What's good for young educated white men is good for everyone" that drives HN. But downvotes happen for all sorts of weird reasons I don't understand.

Choosing somethind to dedicate time and effort is consistently one of the hardest decisions one can take. Choosing something (or sometimes someone) can mean you are giving up on an (almost) infinite number of other options.

I encouter this pretty frequently between people getting into serious cientific research.

That's your deep work then (if you are striving for one) - finding it. Focus on that.

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