(www.lesswrong.com) Third Time: a better way to work — LessWrong
ROAM_REFS: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RWu8eZqbwgB9zaerh/third-time-a-better-way-to-work
HOW CAN you be more productive? Instead of half-working all day, it’s better to work in focused stints, with breaks in between to recover. There are various ways to do this, but here's my new technique, called Third Time. The gist of it is:
- Work for as long or as short as you like, until you want or need to break; then
- Break for up to one-third of the time you’ve just worked.
So after 15 minutes of dealing with emails, you could stop for up to 5 minutes. After an hour-long meeting, you can take a good 20-minute break. And if a task bores you after 3 minutes, you can even break then—but only for 1 minute! Breaks reward you for working, but proper breaks have to be earned.