I’ve been a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique for almost a year now. No, I don’t go as far as actually having a ticking timer in my office in front of my co-workers, and I don’t necessarily plan the day in advance, but I do try to break up my work in 25-min iterations punctuated by 5-min breaks.
I used to use Ubuntu’s Timer applet to alert me to take a break, but a month ago I found what I now believe to be the perfect complement to the Pomodoro Technique: a nice little application called Workrave.
Workrave will let you define work intervals after which it will, shall we say, strongly encourage you to take a break and propose a couple of physical exercises. I’ve installed Workrave under Ubuntu (I believe it runs also on Windows) and configured it for:
* no micro-breaks
* a 5-min rest break after 25 min of work
* a daily limit of 8 hours (never reached)
Try it out! It’s completely free and quite nice. I can also recommend the Pomodoro Technique Illustrated book from the Pragmatic Programmers, but you might also want to begin with the free “official” Pomodoro book.
Excellent tip, thanks for sharing, David. I will try this technique and aim for objectives 1 and 2. Point 3: it depends on what you call work? And how do you separate if from_life?
My personal goal here was to limit my “screen-time” to not more than 8 hours per day, for obvious health reasons. I’m lucky enough to have a work that I enjoy so much that I will continue thinking, reading and writing about it long after leaving the office, and I most likely exceed the 8 hour per day limit, but computer time per se should be limited.