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Found another helpful addition to the gmail part of the system - install google lab "Multiple Inboxes", and add an inbox for "Action" and an inbox for "Waiting" (or whatever labels you use for those categories). I set mine to show below the main inbox. So now whenever I go to gmail, I see my inbox, whatever "action" emails I need to deal with, and whatever emails I'm waiting for a response on. It helps make sure I don't forget about my "processed" emails.
What modifications? I really like the pomodoro technique (so far - still in the novice stages of using it), but its rigidity doesn't lend itself well to a lot of tasks that I deal with - reading papers and writing code, mainly. In both cases, it takes a lot of work to wrap my head around things, and I lose that if I take a break at the wrong time. So when I'm doing those tasks, I'm breaking off chunks that roughly correspond to 20 minutes (like a sub function of code, or reading the intro and methods of a paper), and working until I hit that milestone. When I'm doing something where it doesn't matter when I take breaks, I'm trying to follow the pomodoro technique more exactly.
Other than that... I'm actually not sure that I'm doing much that's very different. I think that may have been a reflexive addition of fudge factor. Although I reserve the right to make further modifications.
Oh - one minor addition to the Eizenhower matrix. I'm trying to follow a common rule in the academic world, that every day you should spend at least an hour working on the project that is closest to completion. Which is just a way of weighting things within the "Important" row.
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This seems like a very good idea, but I'm not sure that it fills the same role as the traditional Pomodoro (grain of salt: still new to Pomodoro).
One of the problems that I find when programming (and a lot of other tasks, really) is that it's easy to get wrapped up in "how do I implement this?" instead of "What do I need to implement to achieve my goal?". This is especially problematic when it becomes even finer scaled - "I need to understand/rework this one little part because maybe it's causing the current bug/error" instead of "what is the most time-efficient way for me to try to solve the current bug/error". I've spent many hours banging my head against a wall trying to implement/fix something that was ultimately unimportant. Your technique here seems to be a great solution to this problem - frequently pulling out of tactical mode to think strategically, (plus making sure that you're fed etc, which has a huge impact on my work efficiency).
On the other hand, my impression with the Pomodoro technique is that part of the goal is to make it easier to stay motivated - it's much easier for me to sustain a decent pace of work for a day when I know that every 20 or 25 minutes I'm going to have a 5 minute break to do something fun. I'm looking forward to trying your modification, but I'm wondering if, at least for myself, I'm going to need an additional five minutes to just do something fun (at least if I want to be able to keep up my work all day long). Although, as you point out, 15 minutes is actually a long time, and maybe only 10 minutes of it is really necessary for the strategic thinking and body maintenance stuff.
Hey, thanks for the insight! You hit right on the head what benefit I derive from this, and I think you're right that I neglected to notice that the benefit is pretty different from that of the original Pomodoro. And, I actually still do use the original Pomodoro when I need to bust through tasks I really don't want to do, because the "It's only 25 minutes" is pretty compelling. Good point.