It was another late night at the office. The clock ticked past midnight, and I found myself staring blankly at the computer screen, surrounded by half-finished projects and a growing sense of frustration. This scene had become all too familiar – tasks that should have taken an hour stretching into endless marathons of distraction and procrastination. I knew something had to change.
As I drove home that night, the city lights blurring past my windshield, I reflected on my college days. Back then, faced with looming deadlines and complex programming assignments, I had somehow managed to tap into a wellspring of focus and efficiency. What had changed?
The next morning, fueled by determination and far too much coffee, I began researching productivity techniques. That's when I stumbled upon Parkinson's Law — the idea that work expands to fill the time available.
I started thinking about what that meant in practice. When I feel like I have plenty of time, I tend to let the work expand with it. I add things, polish things that probably don't need polishing, wander into side tasks, or somehow find distractions that consume the extra space. But when the time is genuinely limited, I start asking different questions: What actually matters? What can I realistically finish within this time? What can I leave out?
It was a lightbulb moment.
Could I recreate some of the urgency of those college deadlines — without needing the stress of an actual deadline?
I started with an annoyingly simple experiment
A three-minute alarm on my phone.
That's it.
I set an alarm to repeat every three minutes while I worked.
Every time it sounded, I asked myself one question:
Am I still doing what I intended to be doing?
- Ping.
- Check.
- Continue.
- Three minutes later:
- Ping.
- Check.
- Continue.
At first, it was irritating.
Actually, it was very irritating.
But it also showed me something I hadn't noticed before: how quickly I could drift.
Sometimes the alarm went off and I was exactly where I should be.
Great. Continue.
Other times I'd suddenly realize I was reading a message, browsing something unrelated, reorganizing something that didn't need reorganizing, or disappearing into some interesting-but-not-important detail.
The alarm didn't make me focused. It did something smaller.
It made me notice when I wasn't.
And surprisingly, that was often enough to bring me back.
After using it for a while, the sound itself started acquiring meaning. It wasn't simply an alarm anymore.
It meant:
Where are you?
I noticed something else too. Sometimes the alarm didn't pull me back into the work because I was already working. Instead, it made me aware of how intensely I was working.
Ping.
I'm still on task.
But I'm getting sluggish, could I push a little faster? Think a little harder?
It felt almost like someone briefly tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Keep going.”
Not enough to break the work, but sometimes just enough to make me press the pedal a little harder.
So the same sound started serving two different purposes for me:
When I had drifted, it helped me return.
When I was already focused, it sometimes helped me lean further into the work.
But three minutes can also be a terrible interval
I don't think everybody should put an alarm on every three minutes.
Sometimes I shouldn't either.
If I'm already deeply absorbed in programming, writing, reading, talking to someone, or solving something complicated, an alarm every three minutes can become the distraction.
That taught me another useful distinction.
There are times when my biggest problem is:
I keep drifting without noticing.
And there are other times when the problem is:
Please don't interrupt me; I'm finally focused.
Those are different states. They probably shouldn't use the same routine.
The three-minute alarm became useful to me specifically when losing awareness of my task was more costly than the interruption.
And that led me to another experiment.
I started playing with colors
Encouraged by this small success, I decided to add another layer to my experiment. Inspired by the traffic lights I passed on my commute, I created a color-coding system for my desk.- Green: Go. Work on the task.
- Yellow: You're approaching a transition. Finish the thought you're working on and prepare to stop.
- Red: Stop. Step away. Recover.
Nothing sophisticated.
But that was precisely why I liked it.
I didn't have to read:
“You are currently in your focused working period. Please continue working on the selected task.”
I could just see green.
My brain already knew what green meant.
The color wasn't doing the work for me. It wasn't creating discipline or motivation.
It was simply telling me:
This is where you are right now.
That became especially useful after I drifted.
The sound could get my attention.
The color could tell me my current state.
And then I only needed to know what came next.
I had accidentally created another productivity problem
By this point I had timers.- I had alarms.
- I had colors.
- I had work intervals.
- I had breaks.
- I wanted reminders.
- Sometimes I wanted a checklist.
- And at the end, I wanted to ask whether the routine had actually worked.
All these individual tricks were useful, but managing them separately was becoming another job.
I didn't want a productivity system that required me to manage the productivity system while I was trying to work.
I wanted to press Start and have the routine guide me through itself.
That problem eventually became part of why I built Routine5.
Sound tells me when. Color tells me where.
This is probably the simplest way I now understand it.Sound gets my attention.
Something happened. Check.
Color tells me what state I'm in.
Green. Yellow. Red.
And the routine tells me what comes next.
Once I saw it that way, Routine5 became more than a timer.
A routine could have timed steps or steps that wait for me to continue manually. It could use sounds, colors, voice instructions, checklists, or other cues—but only when they were useful.
The goal wasn't to fill every routine with alerts.
The goal was almost the opposite:
give me the least amount of information necessary to stay oriented.
Pomodoro became an experiment too
One routine that came out of this was my version of Pomodoro, which I call #PomodoroPlus.
The basic structure is familiar: focused work, short break, focused work again.
But I added something I cared about more: evaluation.
After the larger work block, I wanted to stop and ask:
- What actually happened?
- Did I finish what I expected?
- Where did I get stuck?
- Was the routine useful?
- Should anything change next time?
That review matters to me because I don't want to follow a routine merely because somebody—including past me—said it was a good routine.
I want to know whether it works.
Another routine is much simpler: #3MinsAlarm.
For a period of time, every three minutes:
- Ping.
- Am I still doing what I intended?
- Yes?
- Continue.
- No?
- Return.
That's essentially the whole routine.
And sometimes that's enough.
I still get distracted
None of this turned me into a productivity machine.
- Sometimes the alarm annoys me.
- Sometimes I ignore it.
- Sometimes I change the interval.
- Sometimes I turn it off because I'm already focused and the system that was supposed to protect my attention has started interrupting it instead.
That's part of the experiment.
What changed for me wasn't that distraction disappeared.
I became better at noticing it sooner.
And I had something prepared to help me return.
I used to think productivity systems were mainly about telling me what to do.
Now I think there's another problem:
Sometimes I already know exactly what to do—I just need help staying oriented while I'm doing it.
- A sound can remind me that I've moved.
- A color can tell me where I am.
- A routine can tell me where I'm going next.
Maybe that's why I still like the conductor metaphor.
- The instruments don't play because the conductor forces them to.
- The conductor keeps everyone aware of the same moment in the music.
- That's what these cues became for me.
- Not commands.
I know this exact system might not work for everyone. We all have our own rhythms and preferences. But my journey has taught me the power of experimentation, of finding what resonates with you and building upon it. Whether it's the gentle chime of an alarm, the visual cue of a color, or the structure of a well-designed routine, there are tools out there to help us all become the conductors of our own lives.
As I sit here now, wrapping up this reflection with the soft ping of my 3-minute alarm in the background (#3MinsAlarm), I can't help but smile. The symphony of my workday is about to begin anew, and I can't wait to see what beautiful music we'll make today.