Ah, this is a tough question! I use sprints of varying lengths to help me stay focused when I’m writing. I don’t always need them, but I need them more often than I use them, to be honest.
5 minutes
Five minute sprints are good for when I just want to write and gain a lot of momentum. It really keeps me tightly focused on the writing, and I’m almost always trying to beat the clock to about 100 words. It’s about the only time I can consistently hit a pace above 1,000 words an hour.
15 minutes
A fifteen minute sprint works for me when I want something quick that’s easy to add up. A quarter hour is almost always easy math. :D
20 minutes
Twenty minute sprints are just about the perfect length for me. I rarely get distracted during them unless there are outside interruptions. The math is a little trickier through, because it’s one-third of an hour, or .333333 with a never ending line of threes. :)
25 minutes
Twenty-five minute sprints are great! I like them because they work well with my fifty minute sessions (a length that works really well for me). It’s exactly one-half of fifty minutes. It’s also a standard Pomodoro length if you like the Pomodoro Technique. The math is even tricker though, at .4166666666 (never ending sixes again). But I can stay focused on a sprint for 25 minutes usually. Not always.
30 minutes
A thirty minute sprint is a bit of a commitment. I can do it, but it sometimes feels too long. It’s easier for me to interrupt myself, and it’s easier to find my mind wander to something else if the writing starts to feel hard. With shorter sprint lengths, I can usually push through that kind of thing and keep going until the end, but with a thirty minute sprint, I fail a bit more often.
More than 30 minutes
Anything over thirty minutes isn’t really a sprint. They’re getting into marathon territory. Longer time blocks are great when you want to dig in and focus. A timer sometimes helps (as I said before, I like fifty minute sessions a lot), but sometimes the timer is just an interruption.
So there you go, a list of all the different sprint lengths I use often and how I think about them.
I do sometimes choose different sprint lengths (one I like is twelve minutes because it is one-fifth of an hour), but those are just novelties. Most often, I stick to the ones above.