Productivity for Builders: Think Smaller, Move Faster

Let’s be honest—most of us don’t have a distraction problem. We have a focus problem. You open your laptop to work on a feature, and somehow two hours later you’re deep into redesigning your Notion dashboard, reading Hacker News, and debating tabs vs. spaces on Slack.

And the actual work? Still untouched.

The trick isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less, with more intention.

Here’s a principle we follow at Appmosis when building products: Aim to do just one or two real things per day. That’s it. Not ten. Not five. Just one or two things that actually push the product forward in a meaningful, incremental way.

That means shipping a small improvement, resolving a thorny bug, cleaning up confusing onboarding copy, or reviewing a teammate’s PR with full attention. But do it with focus—deep, uninterrupted focus—for 45 to 60 minutes at a time. Then take a break. And then come back if you’re still in flow.

We often think of productivity in hours. “I worked eight hours today.” But if you actually focus—and I mean no Slack, no email, no context switching—you’ll find that one solid hour can outperform three distracted ones.

This is where the Pomodoro Technique comes in. Yes, it sounds like a pasta dish. But it’s a dead simple way to stay locked in: Set a timer, work for 25–50 minutes, then take a 5–10 minute break. Rinse and repeat. You can tweak the interval—some folks like 45/10, others prefer 60/15. Find your groove.

In real software development, this matters. Take our recent work on a performance charting feature. Instead of saying, “Let’s build the whole thing this week,” we broke it down:

• Day 1: Sketch a wireframe and get buy-in from the team

• Day 2: Build the backend endpoint for the data

• Day 3: Create a basic line chart with dummy data

• Day 4: Hook it up to the real API and test edge cases

• Day 5: Polish the UI and review accessibility

Each day, the goal was small. Just push the ball forward a bit. No heroic all-nighters. No big bang launches. Just incremental, compounding effort.

We used focused sessions—no meetings, no tabs open except the editor, no “quick scroll” on X. And guess what? The feature shipped on time. With zero drama.

This approach works even better when your team is on the same page. Agree on the one or two priorities for the day. Let everyone choose their own Pomodoro intervals. Respect each other’s focus time—no random pings. And make sure that, at the end of the day, you can point to that one real thing you got done.

That’s how you build products that don’t just look great in sprint demos—but actually ship, improve, and evolve.

So next time you sit down to work, ask yourself: What’s the one thing that matters today?

Then shut out the noise, set a timer, and go.