How to do more, tired less. Emacs pomidor

Introduction

With age, my performance does not become higher. Now I can not sit for 6 hours without getting up: the back, neck, eyes - it all starts to hurt sooner or later.

Now this problem is particularly relevant, because our game is already running in early access, and we need to rush headlong to release.

What is the problem?

I tried different methods to improve performance. And almost all of them either do not work at all, or work on them for more than 2-3 days does not work. As a result, my health schedule looks like this:

After a period of uptime (from a few days), there is a rollback period, when most of the time it turns out to be only prokrasinirovat.

And everything would be fine if every year, with each additional factor of responsibility, the period of efficiency did not shorten, and the period of rollback did not increase.

Decision

In the end, I seem to have found a suitable technique for me — a tomato technique . It is designed to balance these periods, thereby making more and less tired.

At its core, it is simple to dope. We take a kitchen timer, start for 25 minutes and work, trying not to be distracted for anything. Yes, even for this cherished flashing icon of the incoming message (it is better to just close everything that can blink or squeak). This gives us basic performance.

After a 25-minute period, we start a timer for 5 minutes and rest. Preferably not at the monitor. It is advisable to do exercises for the eyes and neck . This should help us be less tired.

We repeat this cycle several times, sometimes increasing the break to 10-15 minutes.

Being in a 25-minute working interval, it is easier to control bouts of procrastination. And moments of rest help to look at the current problem from a different angle. Often, it helps not to waste a lot of time on a deliberately dead-end solution. Everyone, after all, struggled with the problem several hours in the evening, and in the morning, as if by magic, she solved it herself in 15 minutes, and this was easy and natural.

Emacs to the rescue

And so, with the technology decided. And since I'm an Emacs OS user, the first thing I did was go look for something that would help me use the tomato technique in my favorite editor. Everything that I found and tried in one way or another did not satisfy my requirements.

An attempt to modify the timer that was closest to what I needed was unsuccessful. First, the project seems abandoned, and secondly, I did not manage to add the features I needed. Which in a logical way led me to the idea of ​​writing my own timer.

Meet: pomidor .

It's very simple: we start the timer, it immediately starts counting time. After 25 minutes, processing begins. At the moment of concentration at work, I don’t want to hear the alarm clock, but I don’t need to start the rest automatically either. Therefore, during the processing period, a light click sounds once a minute, and a tray notification is also displayed. Of course, everything can be configured or completely disabled.

When we decided to rest, we press the spacebar and, in fact, we rest. The horse timer, shown on top, is designed to help you understand that it’s time to get back to work. And the horse is because, at the moment of rest, we have to do exercises at the other end of the room, and not to stare at boobs seals. Press the space bar again and start a new cycle.

That's all what I wanted to share.

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TL; DR

We use a pomidor for a tomato technique , which will help us do more and get tired less.