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

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