I find it really interesting that modern CPUs are designed for "interrupt coalescing," where they group interruptions into clusters. It’d be great if modern desktop/mobile OSes were designed for that: "Only notify me once every 5/10/30/60 minutes, but then tell me everything."
That's exactly why I've never tried it. I haven't found many situations where I can clock in at a specific time and clock out a few minutes later. 15 minutes, 25 minutes, however long that clock is set for, what if I haven't even started to grasp the problem? And then I have to reset my mind?
Again, I haven't even tried it, but my technique usually consists of "start working on a problem, stop working when you need a break". Works pretty well, and there's no timer involved.
Pomodoro designed to solve procrastination issues, when you're spending time watching cats on youtube instead of starting to work. If you have no problems starting to work, you don't need pomodoro, just do your work.
There are trade offs to using pomodoro, but I find it's worth it. I get more work done with it than without it even taking into consideration distraction and switching costs.
I might be annoyed to be interrupted when I'm in the zone, but I don't procrastinate or lose focus during work intervals — being interrupted every 25 minutes is better than spending those 25 minutes scrolling through Reddit or HN.
Also, if a session ends and I'm really focused, I just ignore it and carry on working. Pomodoro is a framework, not a straitjacket.
It'd also save battery. I wish there was an easy way to set my phone to connect to the internet every 10-20 minutes. I don't want to have the 3G running the whole time, just let me know within a reasonable period of time if I have any new notifications.
This. I wish the mobile OSes provided a setting allowing me to coalesce interruptions around predefined points in time, regular (e.g. every 2 hours) or pre-defined (e.g. 11:00AM, 3:00PM, 18:00PM). This should be an OS-level setting for the user, not an API feature for app developers to support.
