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“Breakdice”: Offloading Your Executive Function to Recharge Your Brain
# No AI required; just physics, paper, and tape.
Hey, you with the ADHD brain: give me your top three tips for sustaining focus at work!
I’ll wait…
…
…
…Ok, I’m not that great at waiting. But if you made the list, I bet that for most, if not all of you, one of the strategies you listed was the good ‘ol pomodoro technique.
Named after a tomato-shaped timer (optional), it usually means setting a timer for 25 minutes for focused work, and then when the timer went off you took a five-minute break. After three or four of these cycles, you’d take a fifteen minute break.
This article is not about pomodoros.
It’s about the problem with pomodoros, particularly for ADHD brains, and the crafty (not bragging, literally it’s a craft project) way that I found to solve them.
“Break” is a deceptive word.
Here’s the issue: if I tell you that you can “take a break”, the odds are that you will pull out your phone to check socials, messages, read the latest post from your favorite Medium or Substack writer, something like that.
