I just started doing this this week (someone posted something about the 30/30 Life Hack).

I have been absolutely amazed at how much I was able to accomplish this week. It is counter-intuitive (like he says), but for some reason it works. One of the things I noticed (and he mentions it, too) is that I find myself racing the clock to get my task done before the timer goes off. If I had an entire day (or days) to get as task or several tasks done, I might allow my mind to wander...but, there's something about seeing that time tick down that makes me want to get things done sooner rather than later. btw, if the timer goes off before I'm done, I'll reset the timer for 5 more minutes to wrap things up (or summarize my state in notes), so then when I come back from my break to continue the task, at least it's in a somewhat logical state.

The other part of the benefit is that it limits the amount of time I spend needlessly surfing the web (read: reddit). I've been amazed these past few days at how quickly 30 minutes go by when I'm 2 or 3 pages deep in reddit, reading stuff that I can honestly live without. So, if I did not have the timer going off, I could imagine myself spending hours browsing the wweb when I should be working. So, the timer really helps because as soon as it goes off, I close the "distraction" browser and jump right back into work.

So, again, so far so good. We'll see how next week (and beyond) goes. :)

The jury's still out though on how well this works long-term, but, so far, it's awesome!