My favorite life hack: (10+2)*5

I'm a huge fan of both Lifehacker and Merlin Mann's 43 Folders. They're both blogs about tricks and tips to be as productive as possible using simple tools or ideas.

My favorite life hack ever has to be the (10+2)*5 life hack from 43 Folders. Having a major addiction to the web and my feed aggregator both often kill my productivity. This is especially true when I'm coding. I'm already at the computer, so a quick switch from my editor to my web browser seems so easy and painless. But then I notice a new Paul Graham essay, or as is the case these days, a new Google product, and all of a sudden I've lost 10 minutes and have forgotten what I was doing. As Joel Spolsky writes:

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone.

However, with the (10+2)*5 hack, you work hard for 10 minutes, knowing that at the end of that time, you must take a 2 minute break. That's when you read the short blog posts, queue up the longer essays for later, get coffee, or check your email. But you make sure this break is exactly 2 minutes long. Then you go back to work for another 10 minutes. The 2 minute break is short enough that you remember what you were working on, but long enough that you feel refreshed and like you're still up on the latest news. So, repeating this 5 times, you have worked for 50 out of the 60 minutes in the hour. That's really impressive.

The key is to adhere strictly to your alarms knowing that it won't be long until you're able to go back to working or reading (depending on which part of the cycle you're in).