The timer my son taught me

The hardest part of any habit is starting. I knew that in the abstract for years before my son taught me what it actually means, and what to do about it.

The timer my son taught me

He recently went through the particular hell of GCSE revision, and the wall was never the work itself, it was beginning it. Fifteen minutes felt like forever to him, and holding focus for even that long was harder still. We are now going through assessment for ADHD and autism, which has reframed a lot of this for both of us, though the difficulty was real long before any of it had a name.

I did some reading and bought a Pomodoro cube, the kind you set by turning the right face up, fifteen, twenty-five, fifty minutes, and the timer just starts. It was a small revelation. It seemed to take away all the effort he had been spending on not knowing when the session would end. Over a few weeks the sessions stretched to fifty minutes, broken up by timed breaks, and it worked well enough that I started using a cube myself for the tasks I keep putting off.

Making the clock someone else’s problem

What the cube does is oddly specific. It does not make the work easier, and it does not make you want to do it. It removes the question of when you will be allowed to stop.

That question turns out to be expensive. Before the cube, a large part of my son’s effort was going into negotiating with himself about the size of the thing he was about to begin. An hour of revision is an abstract, open-ended dread. Fifty minutes with a cube sitting on the desk is a known quantity that will end whether or not the work goes well.

I notice the same thing in my own work. The tasks I put off are rarely the difficult ones. They are the ones where I have not decided how long I am going to spend, so beginning means committing to an unknown. Turn the cube over and the commitment shrinks to something I can actually agree to.

What I took from it

Anything that lowers the cost of beginning is worth more than it looks. Not because starting is the whole job, but because it is the part where most attempts quietly die.

It is a small object and a blunt idea, and it has done more for how I work than most of the systems I have read about. My son found it first, which I think is the part he would want mentioned.