I’m always up for a good life hack to improve my productivity so I wanted to share the most recent one I’ve discovered.

The Pomodora technique is a method for time managment and focus. Most of you have probably heard of it. The gist of it is that you work hard and focus for 25 minutes and then reward yourself with a 5 minute break.

At first this might seem like a lot of wasted time with all these breaks but it really is amazing how much these breaks help you concentrate for that 25 minutes of work. Also, the 5 minute break doesn’t neccesarily have to be wasting time; I try to force myself to only check and respond to emails during the break time, this allows me to focus on coding for 25 minutes, take 5 minutes to handle email and give my brain a break, then jump back into code.

One tool that has been incredibly valuable to enforce this is Pomodoro by Steve Klabnik. It’s a simple Ruby script that will redirect time sucking websites except for the 5 minute break periods. I really recommend you try this out to get the full effect of Pomodoro.