Day 6 Tip
Quick Tip: Shorter & Longer Time Slices: Theory & Practice
The Pomodoro Technique (and this author) recommends time slices of between 15 and 30 minutes maximum. The thinking is that you can’t get much done in less than 15 minutes, but if you go past 30 minutes your attention is going to start wandering, and you will tire yourself out well before the end of the work day.
Personally, I think even a short 5 minutes time slice can make sense when you are trying to overcome a psychological barrier to getting started. A simple “Take 5 minutes to come up with a concrete objective for your first full time slice” task can really help get you started in the morning. Once you’ve overcome that initial barrier, it gets much easier.
Some people prefer much longer time slices and previous versions of Vitamin-R, simply did not allow for this. I’m not a fan. Still breaking down your work day into chunks for 1 hour is better than not breaking it down at all.
So from version 4 onwards, you can configure the duration slider to show a duration between 45 minutes and 2 hours in the following increments: 3/4 of an hour, 1 hour, 1.5 hours, 2 hours. In each screen with a duration slider:
Press Control-R, type Duration Scale and use Return to select your preferred scale.