I have been thinking to try Pomodoro technique for a while now, but it can be hard to justify taking 5 min break every 25 minutes. In case you are not familiar with the technique, the premise is that our brains can't focus effectively on something for longer than 25 minutes, at which point it needs a break or distraction of some sort. Getting up to move around and stretch your muscles somewhat, is a good use of the break time, anything, really, that would shift focus away from the task at hand.
My final project at the bootcamp was based around the technique, it was a task tracker with Pomodoro integrated. These days every time I think about this project, all I think of is how many crimes against JS and good code design in general I have comitted at a time.
So, anyway, enough reminiscing, long story short, we tried it this week! I say we is because I spent a week pairing with Sam, a fellow resident, on Mastermind game. And he has been trying to use it, so it was a good opportunity to do it together, obviously. We also got other residents in on it, which made things even better.
We tried to use the break time wisely, we would practice juggling or type racing. Doing it together as a team made a whole lot easier to stick to it, as it can be hard to pull away from the task when the timer goes off. When you are working by yourself then it is much easier to just ignore the reminder to take a break and to just carry on working because you feel that you are really focusing on a task.
So far I would say that it helped us stay more alert in the afternoon, I didn't feel the slump in energy and productivity that you often can feel in the afternoon. Right now the plan is to stick to the technique and see how it goes, but so far we see its positive effect, and I will report back on this after we have used it for sometime.
PS Pomodoro stands for tomato in Italian, hence the title, hope it wasn't too cryptic :)