In this week’s episode, we are going to introduce you to a productivity accountability technique called 25/55 (named for touching base every 25 and 55 minutes of every working hour). We describe what the 25/55 productivity accountability technique is, its components and why it works, how long you should practice a technique like this, and even a discussion on automating your check-ins. We’ll close out with some tips for those who may not feel like 25/55 will work for them; you’d be surprised!
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In this Cast | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Show Notes | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults w/ Attention Deficit Disorder) by Kate Kelly and Peggy RamundoFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhDDefault Mode Network (mind wandering)BlipBlip (Android)TelegramToggl TrackApple ShortcutsIFTTTRescueTimeActivTrakManicTime
Raw Text Transcript | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique
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Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud, with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:24And I'm Francis Wade.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. This week, we'll be discussing something called the 25/55 technique, we're going to talk about what it is why you would do it, how it all kind of works? And then how long you should do the 25/55 technique, if at all? What are the parameters for why you would want to do it, and some of the underpinnings for why you would approach the system for some particular length of time or not. So let's get into what the 25/55 technique is. Its origins are a bit muddy for me. So do not think that I know everything about this origin story, the details that I can say and remember well enough is that many years ago, this is going back a little bit more than a decade ago, a friend of mine had asked me to, in essence, start doing this. And I said, Oh, well, where did this come from? And my best recollection is that it was generated from some thoughts related to the book by Dr. Edward Hallowell. You mean I'm not lazy, stupid or crazy, which is, which is a self help book for adults with ADHD. And so I'll put a link to that book in the show notes. And so I believe that's where the, the idea of this all came from. The 25/55 technique is a method for you to be able to touch base with a social accountability partner throughout the day, and helping you to plan and manage from the half hour level. And so this is how it works, you find a communication platform that you both can agree on. And you in essence, will every 25 and 55 of the hour. And again, you can choose, you know, every 15 and 45 of the hour, it really doesn't matter what the kind of the meter of the or the tempo of the technique is, you get to choose if it's on the half hour and the hour, or if it's on the 25 and 55 at the hour. But kind of using a little bit of Pomodoro Technique here, giving yourself that five minute break between every 25 and 30 of the hour is kind of built into the 2555 techniques. So you choose a communications platform, it can be synchronous, or asynchronous, as long as you both can keep a thread going with one another. And so say SMS text messaging every 25 of the hour, you would write to the person starting at some particular hour of the day. So say you want to start at the eight o'clock hour, in the morning, you would say at 7:55am, you would you would send a message telling your accountability partner, what it is you plan to do in the next 30 minutes. Now, you then start working on that 30 minutes of work focused. And then at 8:25am, you would then again, message your accountability partner, and let them know what it is that you accomplished in the past half hour, did you do what you said you were going to do at 7:55. And then you're going to tell your accountability partner what you're going to do in the next 30 minutes. And that next 30 minutes is from the next hour, or it could be from from the 25 minute forward. I think that if you utilize the Pomodoro Technique, here, you would take that five minutes, take a breather, do what you want to do. And then at 8:30, you would start working on the next thing. And so you work on that for the next 25 minutes. So you are in essence, just checking in with that accountability partner. And mind you, your accountability partner is doing the same thing, which means that both of you are accountable to touching base. But if one for some reason lapses in touching base with that person, then the other person's message should prompt you to go ahead and respond back with your 25 or 55. You know, touch point. So you are throughout the day doing that process and keeping each other accountable in the sense that you're both watching what each other is doing, and not really providing any feedback. The notion behind the social accountability is not for you to be giving feedback necessarily. But you can obviously modify the technique in order to do that. It just depends on the nature of the accountability relationship and what you want each other to do in that regard. In my particular circumstance, I don't want any feedback. I just want the accountability to know that I am telling Someone else what it is I should be doing. And I'm doing it outside of myself beyond that, I really don't want anything. And so the goal then is to figure out the parts that work for you. And beef those up,
Augusto Pinaud 5:12there was two things that provide for me, one remind me to a book from the late Peter Drucker, called executive, the effective executive where the story goes that Drucker is start telling the clients, okay, I want you to write down, you know, what you are doing, or what you were planning to do and what you're actually doing. And this is exactly what for me is it 2555 produced, so every 25 and 55, I write what I did, and what I'm going to do, like, like you, I don't need the feedback, that looking into what I plan for the next half an hour, and what actually happens, allows me to curse correct, or really identify when, or I'm having too many external factors distracting me, or I am simply not moving forward into the goal of the day. But what that has allowed me to do is to get a more accurate information of why things happen or not happen, you know, when I said, Okay, the next the next half an hour. So before we went into this podcast, I Roca the next half an hour, I'm going to be recording ProductivityCast if I get to the end of that hour, and I go back and say, Okay, what I was going to do, okay, I was recording ProductivityCast great. I'm doing exactly what I planned. But if instead of that, I said, Okay, I'm going to be researching for this book, or writing this book. And then at the end of that half an hour, I come and said, You know what, what I did? Well, I don't know. Okay, did I write? No, I did not write, then that allows me into a much more smaller chunks. To catch up how distracted I am. Catch up, what is what is interfering into what I'm planning on what is actually happened. And that has been incredible powerful. For me, I even go on during two times of the two hours in the afternoon and two hours in the late morning, I even reduce it. And instead of report every 30 minutes, I report every 15. And the reason is, because are the times that I tend to get super distracted. So breaking the task into even smaller chunks, has been a lot more useful for me. The other thing that was interesting for me, I I have read for many years how you know Elon Musk, and Dorsey and Twitter and many others, you know, split their days into really, really small segments. And I could not see why. Or I could not understand why that was relevant to mention on delay, start doing 2555 do they do something like that? You know, what I'm planning what I'm doing, I have no clue. But what I can tell you is that the more distracted you feel, and the more distracted you are, the shorter journey to turn that interval, because what allows you is to stay on task, and stay moving forward a lot more. And finally, the other benefit I have experienced for 2555 is the fact that things move forward in a much more consistent way. Because now I don't depend on how distracted or not distracted I am to make things actually happen.
