Not your main point, but I think "rational breaks" is a bit of a misnomer. "Rational" is about the study of cognitive algorithms, and I don't think this has much to do with that. From Firewalling the Rational From the Optimal.
...We're only forced to use the word 'rational' when we talk about the cognitive algorithms which systematically promote goal achievement or map-territory correspondences. Otherwise the word can be deflated out of the sentence; e.g. "It's rational to believe in anthropogenic global warming" goes to "Human activities are causing global temperatures to rise"; or "It's rational to vote for Party X" deflates to "It's optimal to vote for Party X" or just "I think you should vote for Party X".
If you're writing a post comparing the experimental evidence for four different diets, that's not "Rational Dieting", that's "Optimal Dieting". A post about rational dieting is if you're writing about how the sunk cost fallacy causes people to eat food they've already purchased even if they're not hungry, or if you're writing about how the typical mind fallacy or law of small numbers leads people to overestimate how likely it
It's mainly because it's a pun on 'ratio'. But I agree, it's not a great name (despite much brainstorming) - more of a placeholder. Any better suggestions very welcome - see my more detailed comment just posted.
Lol, gotcha. The ratio-pun is a much better excuse than usual, although I wouldn't have gotten it without you explaining.
"Optimal breaks" has a similar low-information problem, where the name is just a smart-sounding synonym for "good breaks".
I like this idea, it matches quite closely how I naturally work. I had some spare time this weekend, so I made a quick prototype site: https://rationalbreaks.vercel.app
I like the idea a lot.
However, I really need simple systems in my work routine. Things like "hitting a stopwatch, dividing by three, and carrying over previous rest time" already feels like it's a lot. Even though it's just a few seconds, I prefer if these systems take as little energy as possible to maintain.
What I thought was using a simple shell script: Just start it at the beginning of work, and hit a random key whenever I switch from work to rest or vice versa. It automatically keeps track of my break times.
I don't have Linux at home, but what I tried online ( https://www.onlinegdb.com/online_bash_shell ) is the following: (I am terrible at shell script so this is definitely not optimal, but I want to try something like this in the coming weeks. Perhaps one may want an additional warning or alarm sound if the break time gets below 0, but for me just "keeping track" is enough I think)
convertsecs() {
((h=${1}/3600))
((m=(${1}%3600)/60))
((s=${1}%60))
printf "%02d:%02d:%02d\n" $h $m $s
}
function flex_pomo() {
current=0
resttime=0
total=0
while true; do
until read -s -n 1 -t 0.01; do
&nbs...
Total restriction is tyranny – ruled by a despotic tomato, and forced to work like a robot.
I've heard some people describe the unnaturalness of the pomodoro method as a benefit. The reasoning is that if you take breaks when you feel like it, you're likely to do it 1) after completing a task and before starting the next one, or 2) when the task you're on becomes unusually unpleasant. This timing makes it more difficult / painful to get moving again after the break. If you instead take breaks when you're interrupted by a timer, there's an obvious point at which to resume and a flow to get back into. You might even want to get back to what you were doing. I've found this somewhat true for myself.
The downside to this approach is that you're more likely to lose a lot of state than if you take breaks at times that feel natural. I don't know if there's a good way to combine the two.
Awesome idea! As an excuse to practice some coding, I made a c++ program that runs a little Rational Breaks timer app on the terminal. I've put it on GitHub if anyone wants to try it out (only tested on linux) https://github.com/ben-carew/ratio_breaks Currently in the process of adding a meal breaks feature and making it prettier, that will be up soon. If you use it, please give me feedback and suggest improvements/updates. This is also my first time using GitHub (I'm not a programmer) so any feedback on how that usually works would be great!
I think many people would find this method useful, though it lacks a good name. So any improvements on Rational Breaks are welcome (and $100 if I use it!) The key concepts are:
A good name would capture most of that in a memorable/catchy way - e.g. a pun, rhyme, alliteration or metaphor, and not too abstract/mathematical or long. It could be for the whole method, or for the breaks themselves.
Examples of other not-good-enough names include:
Just possibly it could be called Finn Breaks, after the inventor (as things often are!)
Non-serious suggestion: Fractional-reserve breaking (in analogy to fractional-reserve banking)
Serious suggestion: Liquid Breaks (since the duration of the next break is like a reservoir you are filling slowly, and you can drain it when you want. It also implies flexibility.)
This looks like a very interesting thing to try for my workflow. Since I already use Emacs Org-mode for everything, I took 2 hours today and wrote this package to adapt the org-pomodoro package, which implements normal Pomodoros, to implement Third Time: https://github.com/telotortium/org-pomodoro-third-time.
This is a great idea! I'm gonna try it out. It fixes quite a lot of things with existing systems, as you point out.
I'm curious though, since when have you been experimenting with it and how has it been? I'm assuming it went well, but I am interested to know more about the details in your process (setbacks, changes, etc) and expect it'll be helpful for others experimenting with this as well :)
This sounds like a neat idea, but the implementation looks more complex than for pomodoros, and you've provided a big list of upsides with zero downsides. What makes you think this is actually more useful than whatever people are doing right now? I guess that explanation is supposed to come in part 2?
This is a neat idea! It's elegant enough that I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before.
That said, I'm not sure how well it will work for me. Here are some potential problems I thought of while reading. Of course, people should try experiments for themselves, my relationship to work is pretty unusual.
That is pretty close to how I deal with breaks intuitively. I do many small (<5min) or medium-sized (15 min) breaks and even micros-breaks where I just look around (like Logan in Duncan's quote) or quickly open a fun website or check mail. I would consider these guilt-free breaks in the sense of Soares in Deregulating Distraction.
But I also want to add that people have different relaxation period habits on very different time scales:
I found the third time (rational breaks) focus protocol works extremely well for me, and surprisingly no one has made a good tool for it yet. So I decided to make a gamified version of this - it's also has a lot of social co-working elements in it. The best thing is you get to collect Focumon! A tribute to the classical Pokemon games I loved as a kid. Check it out here and let me know what you think: https://www.focumon.com/about
My first day experimenting with this and had a question.
I worked for 90 min and went to lunch, which I usually take 60 min. However, I only earned 30 min of break assuming a ratio of 3.
I have back-to-back meetings for 2 hours after my lunch break. How much break time should I have after those meetings, since I took an extended lunch break?
Is it 40 min (120/3) or 10 min (40 min earned after 2 hour meetings - 30 min past earned break time due to lunch break)?
Or something else?
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:
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.
This kind of pattern is natural; research confirms that people tend to take longer breaks after working for longer. (One-third is just a recommendation; you can use other break fractions if you prefer.)
Third Time has many advantages over other techniques such as Pomodoro (which I’ll discuss later), but the key one is flexibility. It adapts to your attention span, energy, and schedule, as well as to other people and events. And Third Time isn’t just for your day-job — it suits anything that needs focus or effort, such as studying, practicing an instrument, personal admin, writing, or fitness training.
Using Third Time
Here’s an example of the basic procedure:
Breaks
You needn’t take the full break. Maybe you have a tight deadline, an important customer calls, you’re keen to resume work, or only have a short gap before a meeting. Whatever the reason, if you end a break (say) 5 minutes early, add 5 minutes to your next break. You don’t lose the remaining time, it’s just postponed:
You can shorten and postpone breaks like this, but don’t let them overrun. Break time must be earned by working; it’s like a debit card, not a credit card. So always set an alarm for the end of a break, and resume work as soon as it goes off (don’t snooze it!)
Take breaks whenever you like. Surprisingly, you’ll still end up doing the same amount of work! For example: instead of working for 45 minutes plus a 15-minute break, suppose you do just three minutes’ work plus a one-minute break, and repeat that over and over again. You’ll still be working three-quarters of the time; so in an hour, you’d still get 45 minutes’ work done.
That said, it’s annoying to end a break after just one minute, and keep switching back and forth. So even with tedious tasks, you’ll soon find yourself working longer — and perhaps even enjoying it — to earn a decent break.
While breaking too often is counterproductive, so is breaking too seldom, such as when immersed in an interesting project. Notice when you start to flag, and give yourself a break, to restore focus and avoid burnout.
Take proper breaks. Don’t think, talk or read about work. Instead, get up, walk around, drink water, go outside, chillax. (There’ll be more about how to work & break properly in Part 2 of this article.)
Though it’s best to choose when to work and break yourself, nothing changes if others are in charge. Suppose your boss fixes an hour-long meeting for you, then a five-minute gap, followed by a video call. The meeting earns you a 20-minute break; you can only take five minutes of it, but just add the remaining 15 minutes to your next break. (And if you really can’t take a full break then, carry the leftover time forward again, and so on.)
Interruptions
Similarly, nothing special happens if you get a work-related interruption, e.g. your boss calls you while you’re hard at it. The call is still work, so the clock keeps ticking. Either deal with the interruption, or postpone it (e.g. send to voicemail) and resume what you were doing.
Personal interruptions are different. Suppose you’re working from home, and the doorbell rings: this isn’t work, so a break starts then. Once the interruption is over, figure out when you stopped work, and hence when this break should end (by dividing by 3 as usual). Then either take the rest of the break, or resume work (saving the remaining break time for later). If you’ve already overrun the end of the break, start work immediately.
Meal breaks & big breaks
Most people stop work for lunch, some for dinner. With Third Time, you can divide the day into two or three separate sessions — morning, afternoon, maybe evening — to allow for proper meal breaks between.
If you only take a short time off for lunch, a normal break may suffice for it. For instance, an hour-long meeting just before lunch earns you a 20-minute break — enough to eat at your desk, anyway. Or you could save up more eating time by shortening earlier breaks. If you have lunch in a normal break like this, meals need no special treatment, and your whole workday is a single session.
But if a normal break won’t do, you can take a big break. This means a meal break that lasts as long as you like — longer than you’ve earned from previous work. The only constraint is that you must decide at the start of the break when to resume work, then set an alarm, and obey it as usual. This stops you getting lazy.
If you work into the evening, you can extend dinner in the same way: when a normal break isn’t long enough, you can take a big break, provided you set an alarm first. But only take big breaks for lunch and dinner.
Break minutes you’ve earned are used up by a big break, so you can’t carry them over to the afternoon/evening. Each session starts with a clean slate. (Hence you don’t need to time the work stint just before the meal.) Similarly, you can’t carry unused breaks over from one day to the next.
Sometimes you’ll have a personal task, e.g. going out to buy something, that’s too long to do in a normal break. If possible, do it in a big break, or before/after work. Try to avoid taking unofficial breaks for errands or anything else, lest you allow more and more exceptions to the system, and relapse into chaos.
Other fractions
What matters is not the absolute length of work and breaks, but their length relative to each other. Not enough breaks per hour worked, and you burn out; too many, and you don’t get enough things done.
Fitness training and other physical activities follow the same principle. For instance, with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) you might rest for half of the time you work: between 20-second sprints, you’d rest for 10 seconds; after a 2-minute dash, rest for 1 minute.
Third Time recommends breaking for one-third of your work time (a similar proportion to the Pomodoro and DeskTime techniques). If this sounds lax, a survey showed Britons spend less than half their time in the office actually working! So, with Third Time, you’ll accomplish much more than many people — particularly if you keep your work highly focussed, with no distractions.
But instead of one-third, you can use whatever fraction you like, such as:
If you take a big break, you could shrink your other breaks by using a smaller fraction. For instance, neuroscientist Dr Daniel Levitin suggests working 90-minute stints with 15-minute breaks, plus a long lunch. A fraction of 15 ÷ 90 = 1/6 will achieve this.
Should a deadline or crisis strike, so you need to get a lot done fast, don’t abandon Third Time — just switch to a smaller fraction. Or save up breaks and use them later. Conversely, if you’re tired, or there’s not much to do, you could try a bigger fraction to get more breaks.
Different break fractions also suit different activities, from the gym to piano practice.
The other fractions, above right, let you calculate how much work you’ve done, or will do, without needing a timesheet or schedule. For example, Third Time’s default of 1/3 makes you work 3/4 of the time, so in an eight-hour day you’d complete six hours’ work — regardless of how your meetings, appointments, and interruptions pan out. (To calculate how long you worked if you took a big break, or didn’t use all your breaks, see footnote.[1])
Advantages of Third Time
Various time management techniques involve working for fixed time periods. The most popular one, named Pomodoro after a tomato-shaped timer, alternates 25-minute work stints with 5-minute breaks (or occasionally longer).
While there are benefits to this kind of pattern, there are big problems too, which I discuss in a separate post. In a nutshell, 25-minute stints may be far from optimal. Indeed, any fixed time period is unnatural and mechanical; thoughtful, creative work doesn’t watch clocks. And it's hard to work with other people this way, as their meetings, calls and interruptions won’t fit in with your timeslots. Nor will crises and deadlines. Basically, techniques like Pomodoro are too rigid.
This is because they insist on regulating your work. Third Time’s key insight is that this is unnecessary — you can guarantee how much work you’ll do, just by limiting breaks. This gives you complete freedom in how to divide up your day.
People work best with loose constraints, somewhere between total freedom and total restriction. Total freedom is anarchy — the life of the lazy, the workaholic, and the procrastinator. Total restriction is tyranny — ruled by a despotic tomato, and forced to work like a robot.
Third Time applies a light touch, keeping you in the happy, creative zone between these extremes. Its flexibility is its big advantage over other systems:
If you like Pomodoro or other methods (e.g. the pressure of their short-term deadlines), you can still use them with Third Time to get the best of both worlds, as it doesn’t forbid fixed work stints. I’ll explain more in Part 2 of this article. In fact, Third Time is really a general form of time management technique that encompasses the others, and solves their flaws.
Other benefits of Third Time include:
Summary
Lastly, here in one place are all the steps for using Third Time:
Additional rules:
(Third Time would also work well in a smartphone/web app, or smart speaker skill. Anyone want to create one?)
Part 2 (coming soon) will include tips on how to work and break properly, and using Third Time with other time management systems.
You could also use Third Time with Hopscotch, my way of prioritizing what you work on.
To the day length, add any break minutes left over at the end of the day (including any earned by your final work stint). If you took a big break, subtract its length, and add the break minutes you had earned or saved up just before the meal. Then multiply the total by 3/4 (for the default break fraction of 1/3); or for a break fraction of 1/n, multiply by n/(n + 1).
Thanks to Cat and Ari for many suggestions & comments