Tl;dr: If you can work from home some days a week or at least spend a few hours on most days at home, you can just finish most / all annoying-seeming tasks like cleaning, taking out the trash and cooking in pomodoro breaks, which, if pomodoros are not actively making your work worse, will effectively not take any productive time from you. You can also build many other useful small habits in pomodoro breaks. The point of this post is not to give you one more technique to squeeze “maximum productivity” out of yourself and push out all of the remaining rest and slack from your life. The point is giving you more optionality and opportunity to do stuff you might want to do but struggle to find time for.
Intro
Many intelligent and ambitious people I meet seem to be failing miserably at doing basic maintenance / quality of living spaces tasks like taking out the trash, cooking (a smaller task than you probably think), mopping the floor, shaving, etc.
I claim that if your circumstances allow longer stretches of time you can spend at home doing tasks in some pomodoro-like structure (frequent breaks), you can do basically all of the annoying tasks during the breaks, which means they effectively don’t take any productive time from you. At least, of course, unless pomodoros are significantly hurting your productivity during the non-break blocks.
I will not defend pomodoros themselves too much, that’s for a different post.
The basic idea is working in predefined chunks of time with breaks in between instead of longer stretches. I use 25 mins of work with ~5 min breaks in between (taking a longer break like working out or eating after every ~3 pomodoros).
Many people, myself included, find that this nontrivially increases their productivity – e.g., because it’s often pretty hard for human brains to intensively focus for hours on end. Also, if you are stuck on a problem, taking a break can be the best thing you can do
1) because often some better approach can just come to you in the break (“shower thoughts” outside of a shower)
2) because it at least gives you the optionality to NOT continue the task you are stuck on after the break
I don’t think it interferes too much with “flow” (if you’re into that), but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
I find it convenient to do even many chill-ish tasks in the pomodoro structure so I can naturally take breaks, etc. (but I am probably an exception in this regard)
Cooking
So, back to doing tasks in pomodoro breaks. Maybe the most significant of those tasks is cooking, which can seem to many to be too large / time-consuming for a busy person to spend time on unless they really like doing it. So let’s start with that.
I try to cook exclusively in pomodoro breaks. It usually takes me ~3-4 breaks (~4-5 including cleaning up the dishes) per cooking and I cook for ~3 days at once – so, I often cook for 3 days in ~3-4 pomodoro breaks.
There are tons of foods you can cook like this. You just need to tweak some recipes a bit so that:
You can do them in small subsequent steps that can be separated in time (e.g., in one break, you cut some vegetables, in another you cut tofu, in another, you put stuff into the oven, in the last one you check it and take it out).
They don’t require you to be checking the food all the time.
Tips:
Don’t use a frying pan (requires too much oversight), it’s much better to use an oven or slow cooking in a pot. If you are using a pan, braising is better than just frying.
Cooking vegetarian is usually even easier than using meat since you don’t need to worry about pre-cooking the meat or stuff like that.
Claude will happily help you both come up with the recipe and break it down to work for each break.
If you want an example recipe, here is chilli sin carne (feel free to skip this, not essential to the point):
Break #1: Cut 1-2 onions and three 200-gram tofu blocks (put it all in the fridge at the end of the break)
Break #2: Put a bit of butter / oil into a large pot on a stove. Add onions, keep them there for a bit (idk, like a minute). In the meantime, prep other ingredients, e.g., open cans of canned red kidney beans (I use ~750 g of beans total). Then, add tofu, kidney beans, and ~500 ml of tomato sauce / paste. Add spices.* Mix. Put the lid on.
*My approach to spices is just to throw in random stuff and see if it works. Last time, I used chilli, oregano, curry, marjoram, and salt.
(Optionally, you can also add: a bit of dark chocolate, crushed garlic (~2 cloves), 1-2 bell peppers, or carrots – prepping these optional things will probably add another break)
(If you are cooking this for the first few times, you may need to do the first “2 breaks” worth of work in 3-4 breaks)
Break #3: Check it and remove from stove if it’s ok. Cooking is done.
If you have not yet mastered setting the correct temperature for this, you can do a super quick break in the middle of the pomodoro between breaks #2 and #3 to check and stir the stuff in the pot.
Break #4: Clean the dishes
Chores
Just like with cooking, you can do most chores this way. You just need to break them down to parts that take less than 5 minutes... for example:
vacuuming / mopping the floor — just do small patches of floor at a time and leave the vacuum / mop on spot between the breaks,
taking out the trash (if the garbage containers are not too far),
self-care like shaving or cutting nails,
wiping dust, washing clothes, cleaning up mess on your desk, etc....
A caveat: It kinda requires / really helps to have understanding flatmates that are ok with you just leaving some stuff (e.g., cooking equipment, mop, etc.) on the spot in between the breaks. But I expect that if you explain to them explicitly what you are doing, you don’t leave too much of a mess, and you always clean it up in under 2 hours, most people will be fine with this.
Building Habits
You can also use pomodoro breaks for establishing many other useful habits that you wouldn’t otherwise find time / energy / good triggers for… E.g.:
metta meditation (wish 2 people well), gratitude, or negative visualization,
stretching (e.g., if you want increased mobility for handstands or something),
workout (you can do 5 push ups every break — much better than not working out at all),
...basically anything else that requires under ~3 minutes
(also, it’s probably pretty good for your posture and health to not be sitting for hours on end, and pomodoro breaks can automatically solve this — just stand up every break)
You can probably do at least some of these things even if you are NOT working from home at all, e.g., metta meditation you can do anywhere; for stretching or 5 push ups you can probably find some spot close to your office where it would be ok to do, etc.
Btw, if you think something like “But I can’t remember to do all these different things and it’s not worth for me thinking about them!”... How about taking a piece of paper, writing down the list of things you want to do / could do in pomodoro breaks today, keeping it in the corner of your work table, and just looking at it whenever your pomodoro timer[1] announces the start of a break?
Healthy Relationship with Productivity
You might be thinking that this is just one more borderline-toxic strategy for how to hyperoptimize your life for maximum busyness / seeming productivity. And although you obviously can use it in this way, it’s definitely not what I’m advocating for.
What I’m saying is that it’s very understandable if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on chores and similar tasks. And that it can feel like a really annoying tradeoff where you don’t want to spend your work/chill time on any of these tasks, but you “need” to do them (and then you might end up ignoring cleaning for 3 months and then getting too fed up about the mess and sacrificing an entire day cleaning).
If you want, there is actually another way of keeping your house clean-ish and even managing to cook at home, that can be done with way less friction, and which effectively takes little to no productive time from you, since you are combining the tasks with taking a break from work, which may be a good idea for your productivity anyway.
Tl;dr: If you can work from home some days a week or at least spend a few hours on most days at home, you can just finish most / all annoying-seeming tasks like cleaning, taking out the trash and cooking in pomodoro breaks, which, if pomodoros are not actively making your work worse, will effectively not take any productive time from you. You can also build many other useful small habits in pomodoro breaks.
The point of this post is not to give you one more technique to squeeze “maximum productivity” out of yourself and push out all of the remaining rest and slack from your life. The point is giving you more optionality and opportunity to do stuff you might want to do but struggle to find time for.
Intro
Many intelligent and ambitious people I meet seem to be failing miserably at doing basic maintenance / quality of living spaces tasks like taking out the trash, cooking (a smaller task than you probably think), mopping the floor, shaving, etc.
I claim that if your circumstances allow longer stretches of time you can spend at home doing tasks in some pomodoro-like structure (frequent breaks), you can do basically all of the annoying tasks during the breaks, which means they effectively don’t take any productive time from you. At least, of course, unless pomodoros are significantly hurting your productivity during the non-break blocks.
I will not defend pomodoros themselves too much, that’s for a different post.
Cooking
So, back to doing tasks in pomodoro breaks. Maybe the most significant of those tasks is cooking, which can seem to many to be too large / time-consuming for a busy person to spend time on unless they really like doing it. So let’s start with that.
Tips:
If you want an example recipe, here is chilli sin carne (feel free to skip this, not essential to the point):
Then, add tofu, kidney beans, and ~500 ml of tomato sauce / paste. Add spices.* Mix. Put the lid on.
Chores
Just like with cooking, you can do most chores this way. You just need to break them down to parts that take less than 5 minutes... for example:
A caveat: It kinda requires / really helps to have understanding flatmates that are ok with you just leaving some stuff (e.g., cooking equipment, mop, etc.) on the spot in between the breaks. But I expect that if you explain to them explicitly what you are doing, you don’t leave too much of a mess, and you always clean it up in under 2 hours, most people will be fine with this.
Building Habits
You can also use pomodoro breaks for establishing many other useful habits that you wouldn’t otherwise find time / energy / good triggers for… E.g.:
You can probably do at least some of these things even if you are NOT working from home at all, e.g., metta meditation you can do anywhere; for stretching or 5 push ups you can probably find some spot close to your office where it would be ok to do, etc.
Btw, if you think something like “But I can’t remember to do all these different things and it’s not worth for me thinking about them!”... How about taking a piece of paper, writing down the list of things you want to do / could do in pomodoro breaks today, keeping it in the corner of your work table, and just looking at it whenever your pomodoro timer[1] announces the start of a break?
Healthy Relationship with Productivity
You might be thinking that this is just one more borderline-toxic strategy for how to hyperoptimize your life for maximum busyness / seeming productivity. And although you obviously can use it in this way, it’s definitely not what I’m advocating for.
What I’m saying is that it’s very understandable if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on chores and similar tasks. And that it can feel like a really annoying tradeoff where you don’t want to spend your work/chill time on any of these tasks, but you “need” to do them (and then you might end up ignoring cleaning for 3 months and then getting too fed up about the mess and sacrificing an entire day cleaning).
If you want, there is actually another way of keeping your house clean-ish and even managing to cook at home, that can be done with way less friction, and which effectively takes little to no productive time from you, since you are combining the tasks with taking a break from work, which may be a good idea for your productivity anyway.
I use timer on my smartwatch or this free website.