For the past 3 weeks I’ve been using the Pomodoro Method at work. For those who don’t know, it’s 25 minutes of deeply focused work, followed by a 5 minute break.
In my break I’ve been excercising: running up stairs, doing push ups, wall sits, etc. I’ve always had trouble focusing in open offices, but now I can focus without even needing headphones! And to top that off we use story point estimates, and I started flying through those estimates.
Obviously I’m just one story where the sample size is n=1. But after reading this article I think pairing Pomodoro with some light exercise has some unseen positive feedback.