I’m rubbish at Pokemon Sleep. How can I be rubbish at a game where you play by sleeping? By having a toddler who joins us in bed every night, that’s how. I don’t blame her – I can’t stress enough how little I care about this game – but it means that I wake up to scores of around 250,000 compared to my colleagues’ 2 million plus hauls. Four hours of sleep disturbed by intermittent screams does not a high score make.
Like I said, that’s fine. I’m not entirely comfortable sending all my sleep data to The Pokemon Company to do their worst with, so I’ll likely only play for a little while, to see what it’s all about and try to encounter some of the weird new shinies it’s added. But I’ve found another use for the app, as a productivity tool to help me stay focused throughout the day.
I’ve tried numerous different methods to keep me on track. The Pomodoro method works well for me, where you set intermittent timers for 25 minutes of work followed by quick five minute breaks. However, when those five minutes are up, it’s too easy to just finish your cuppa and eat into your next work session. Over the years, I’ve been using what were once strict time schedules as guidelines, allowing myself a break when I feel like I’ve earned it rather than at specific intervals, undermining the entire point of the system.
My Google Pixel’s Focus Mode is a great help, too. It’s incredibly easy to get distracted by a rogue notification and find yourself down a Reddit rabbit hole in the middle of your workday. Sometimes this results in interesting articles, but most days it’s just time wasted. You can choose which apps are restricted, so I still get messages and phone calls through, but nothing from my email addresses or social media. Focus Mode restricts these notifications, meaning that even though my phone’s right next to me, I’m less likely to get randomly distracted.
Pokemon Sleep is the next evolution of that. I tell my phone I’m having a big old nap for the duration of my 10 hour workday, and leave it be. Sleep asks you to leave your phone on your mattress next to your head, which is too weird for me, so I leave it on my windowsill overnight. I do the same in the daytime now, too, just in my office rather than my bedroom. It records my ‘sleep’, and I’ve taken to wearing headphones rather than playing my music through speakers to keep the noise to a minimum. It still hears keyboard clacks sometimes, but I’m going to reiterate how little I care about the score. What I care about is completing my nap.
I don’t know why, but having Pokemon Sleep running makes me scared to pick up my phone. I don’t want to disturb this fake extended nap I’m taking, ruining whatever points I’ve accumulated. It’s weird, considering that the points are utterly meaningless and the reward is a photo of a snoozy monster or something (I’m not even entirely sure how the score equates to your encounters). But it works. With Sleep recording my office noises, I’m far more focused on getting into a writing rhythm and I’m less likely to interrupt it by picking my phone up for a quick browse.
I don’t entirely understand how this has happened, but Pokemon Sleep is now my go-to productivity app. Maybe I’m cheating the game, maybe it won’t last more than a week, but this has been a week of increased focus and uninterrupted workflow. Thank you, Pokemon Sleep, not for recording my snores, but for stamping down on my distractions.