The Pomodoro Technique

It's called the Pomodoro Technique. It's a strange word, not one we're used to hearing because it's not an English word. Pomodoro is the word for tomato in Italian. The Pomodoro method is literally the Italian tomato method. It's a method of studying that was created by a man called Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s in order to take long periods of unstructured time and to break them down into more manageable periods of focused study time. The reason it's called the Pomodoro method is because the kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student to enact this technique was shaped like a tomato. What is the Pomodoro Technique? Here's how it works. There are six basic steps underlying this technique. The first is to decide on a task that you like to complete.

The second is to set your Pomodoro timer or any kitchen timer for an interval of 25 minutes. You then work on that task in a focused way without distractions until the timer rings at the end of 25 minutes. After the timer rings, you put a check on a piece of paper to indicate that you've completed one Pomodoro. You take a brief break, two to three minutes, and then set the timer again for 25 minutes and go back to work. 25 minutes of focused study, two to three minutes of rest, 25 minutes of focused study, two to three minutes of rest. After four Pomodoros you want to increase that break to 10 or 15 minutes to give yourself a real moment to rest. That's how it works. You do that process, more or less until you've completed a task, or until you've made as much progress as you'd like. The benefits to this are manifold. First, it's simple to do. There's nothing complex about breaking unstructured time into intervals of 25 minutes of work, and two to three minutes of break. Second it doesn't require very much. It requires your focus, and a kitchen timer.

But I think the most powerful benefit of this method is that it allows you to start getting a better sense of how much time things take to accomplish. If for example, you're assigned a problem set every single week for a science class, it's easy to think that you have some sense of how long that problem set takes. But if you were really pressed to give an amount you might have trouble doing so. But if you use this particular technique, you will eventually get a sense that the same problem set requires three Pomodoros every single week. Knowing that allows you to plan for that, and allows you to manage your time more effectively. Now one criticism of the Pomodoro method is that it's a little rigid. 25, two to three, 25, two to three. There's some very simple tips I can give you to help make it a little bit more flexible, and a little bit more friendly if you learn in a slightly different way or if you're working on a slightly different task. Let's talk about what those are.

The first is this, this method requires you to time yourself in very specific intervals. It's going to be tempting to use your cell phone as a timer. Try to avoid that. The reason that Cirillo used a kitchen timer is because it can't distract you with other noises. A kitchen timer does one thing, it times you. Whereas your cell phone is going to give you other kinds of data, it's going to distract you.

The real power of this technique is that those 25-minute intervals are focused study. You don't want the distractions of a cell phone. If you do want to use your cell phone, you can put it on airplane mode. Use it as if it were a kitchen timer. The second thing I would do is consider the task at hand. Some tasks are going to require intervals of study that might be different than 25 minutes. Usually 25 minutes is the shortest interval but I can imagine some activities like reading a long novel that might benefit from 60, 90, or even 120-minute intervals. Another activity I can think of is writing a long essay. It might be hard to write a long essay in 25-minute intervals, it might be more productive to use 90-minute intervals. Think about the task that you're trying to accomplish and use an interval that makes sense for you and is compatible with your work style.

Remember it's not so much how long the interval is that makes this technique powerful, it's that when you're in that interval, you're engaged in focused, deliberate study. Remember you don't have to do this method until you complete an activity. The important thing is that you make meaningful progress. You can always stop and then return to the activity later. In fact, if you're completing an activity that's going to take a lot of time, there are benefits to putting it aside for a moment, taking a break, and working on something else, and then coming back to it.

Finally one of the most powerful benefits of this particular technique is that it allows you to make more accurate predictions about how long things are going to take you. This allows you to be a more accurate planner, and allows you to manage your time more effectively. Again the Pomodoro Technique, not difficult to do. Very powerful in terms of allowing you to plan better to get a better sense of how long things take you to do, and of turning unstructured time into structured, focused, study time.