For people who do something like this: how do you manage logistically? Do you set an alarm? Do you just know when your 30 minutes (or 42, or 50) are up? Do you always keep an eye on the time? I'm curious because the concept seems like it could work, but I lose track of time easily.
I personally set my time by album length. Depending on the work I need to do in the next block, I can range anywhere from 30min to 2hr. Typically it's in the range of 45-80min. I have a few key albums that I listen to often and when listening to those can now subconsciously pace my work to a certain extent.
Of course, you need to be the kind of personal that likes to listen to music while working in order for this to work.
I've been using Rhythmbox to play music, and in it you have a play queue in addition to being able to play directly from the library. It conveniently tells you how long total time in the play queue is. I often toss an album in there, then trim it to the amount of time I have before I want to stand up. There's usually a track or two that could stand to be removed.
I like energetic music for things that are mostly implementation and little thought (e.g. Dragonforce). While I use more relaxed, less vocal music for things that are mostly planning and thinking (e.g. cello concertos or Mogwai)
+1 because I think that this is an important question.
It seems that the intent of this method is to increase productivity. In saying this, nothing kills productivity more than deadline tension. Having to constantly look over at the time would no doubt have this effect.
Well, this morning after reading this I threw together a script in 5 secs to do this for me.
I'm using OS X and like everyone this means I have Growl installed for various applications. I figured that it should be easy enough to announce my times using that.
Looked around, found the commandline tool growlnotify and 5 seconds later...
And for those of us with Linux (needs notification-daemon and libnotify):
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
sleep $((30*60))
notify-send -i applications-games -t 60000 "Play" \
"Hey, it's time to take a break\!"
sleep $((30*60))
notify-send -i applications-office -t 60000 "Work" \
"Now get back to work ..."
done
I'm a little baffled by why people feel that finding a device (hardware or software) that will countdown a specified interval of time and announce the conclusion of that interval is so hard.
The venerable egg-timer has been around for a long time, and would work just fine. You can even setup OS X to use text-to-speech to announce the time on the hour and the half-hour (if you are doing the 30/30). Not to mention that 'countdown clock' software is practically a 'hello world'-level programming project (if you throw out all of the bells-and-whistles like sexy notification animations, etc). On Linux, you could setup a script using 'at' and 'zenity' to remind your of time intervals... etc ...
I personally find that having a deadline increases my productivity. If I feel like I have unlimited time to work on something, it rarely gets done until the last minute.
When I do it, I use the "workrave" program under Linux. You can set your times and it shows you when you need to give a break. It also shows some exercises during breaks.
It's pretty awesome. I have it set up to lock my computer without any way (besides going to the tty screens) to unlock it... Any other way and I end up postponing the breaks and not taking them.
I find "keeping an eye on the time" very distracting. When I work alone, I usually set up my phone timer to some interval and then toss it away, out of sight. I also restrain myself from estimating the remaining time based on looking at computer clock. I just do my work untill it rings. At work I try to avoid using phone timer, as ringing sound might distract my co-workers.
