@caffo not sure what you mean by “smaller blocks of time”? You say you’re using 50 minutes on focusmate, I’ve been using the default Work Cycles time of 40 minutes, each made up of 30 minutes work + 10 minutes for questions and break. I guess you’re saying you do one 50 min focusmate block and then stop and do something else?
Some observations from my experience today, only my second set of Work Cycles:
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Major beeminder similarity, which I guess (?) is a difference from Pomodoro: I think Work Cycles functions nicely as a way to turn a say 4 hour commitment into a very concrete 30 minute one. The slight pressure of the 30 minutes – and a specific goal for that 30 minutes – makes it clearer to yourself in the moment whether you’re actually advancing towards your goal or not. You also feel more vividly how “long” periods like 4 hours are composed of short periods like 30 minutes, and how a 30 minute cycle is composed of minutes/seconds, hence the value of concentrating on what you’re doing right now!
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Fairly obvious/dull thing perhaps: seems best to pick longer cycle times if you’re working on something you find takes more concentrated time to get something done. I was working today on something I have less experience with, and I found 30 minutes was a bit short for that. In that situation I will try 50 mins next time I think. The first time, 30 minutes was fine because the skills I was using were very well practiced already; this time, I found I’d often just figure out what I needed to do when I got to the end of a cycle. On that score it also didn’t help that the activity also involved longish waits of 5 minutes or so for the program I was working on to run (I could get on and continue with work during that, but the context changes to and from starting the program running and working on code made everything take a bit longer).
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If the work you’re doing is a bit fuzzy and open-ended, when you get to the end of your set of cycles, there’s the nice feeling that you know you weren’t messing around!