The tomato of productivity – the Pomodoro Technique

Hands up who thinks young people’s attention spans have gone to crap. Everything is instant, and opinions have to be black and white ‘cos there’s simply no time for nuance.

Thing is, every generation criticises the next one. Hike up your jeans, unplug your walkman, that screen’ll rot your brain, get your head out of that tapestry.

There’s a strong argument to be made that our attention spans haven’t changed. Teenagers aren’t suddenly incapable of focusing. Instead, media has got more savvy about grabbing attention, and younger brains are becoming better at switching between platforms. Goodbye sweet, sweet neuroplasticity. I wasted all my best braincells on middle-8 raps from 90s pop songs; I don’t know where yours went.

All of this to say, if you’ve ever felt like you can’t focus, the pathology behind it might be less neurochemical and more sociological. So maybe give yourself – and your nephew Dylan – some slack. We’re all just trying to make our way in a noisy world.

That said, if you’ve got a chunk of work to get through and you just can’t find the focus, then let me introduce you to Francesco.

Francesco Cirillo

Francesco is studying for a sociology exam. It’s September 1987. He’s surrounded by books and writing implements, but he just can’t get his brain to stay on the same track for more than a couple of minutes.

As soon as he thinks “right, that’s it, time to really focus up and get this work done”, into his head pops a whole, fully-formed todo list of other work he needs to do. For one thing, he could get his desk in order. After all, tidy desk, tidy mind.

Then he’d best sharpen all his pencils, so when he’s in the thick of note-taking, he isn’t getting bogged down by a blunt implement.

Having done all that, he heads to the kitchen to make a snack. As he’s scanning the countertops, his eyes hit on a little tomato shaped kitchen timer. In the days before smart speakers and smart watches and smart phones, dumb little devices like these were vital in making sure the sauce didn’t burn and the pasta didn’t turn to wallpaper paste. (I’m not saying that ‘cos he’s Italian… I’m saying that ‘cos he’s a student. And students love pasta. I love pasta.)

Anyway, Francesco made a humble bet with himself. “Can you stay focused for two minutes without distraction?” he asked. So he grabbed the timer, wound it up, let it go, and picked up his book.

There, on that table in September 1987, I hadn't noticed yet but for the first time I had managed to turn time into an ally. Exactly at the moment when Time appeared to be such a vicious predator to me I managed to stop in front of it, and still and afraid ask this simple question: "How can you, Time, be useful to me now?”

It worked. He found that he could focus for 2 minutes, so we experimented with different durations, all the way up to an hour. After a while he settled on 25 minutes as the optimal amount, with 5 minutes for a break. And thus, the pomodoro technique was born: pomodoro being the Italian word for tomato.

Putting pomodoro into practice

This method of time management is extremely simple. You set a timer – it doesn’t have to be in the shape of a tomato – for 25 minutes. During those 25 minutes, you’re heads-down in work mode. You should be working on one thing and one thing alone. If that one thing is triaging your inbox, the key is to make a note of tasks you need to follow up on, rather than getting sidetracked.

A good tip here is when your brain throws something up – and it probably will – jot it down somewhere and come back to it later. Don’t assume you’ll remember it, and don’t try to bat it away. Writing it down assures your brain that you’re taking care of it.

Once the 25 minute timer goes off, reset it for 5 minutes. This is your down time. Take a break, get up, have a stretch, do whatever you need to do to just clean the pipes for a few minutes. Don’t focus on anything productive, and then once the 5 minutes are up, reset it back to 25 and begin the cycle again.

Each unit of 25 minutes is called a pomodoro, and the plural, rather pleasingly, is pomodori. The plan is to achieve ten pomodori a day, for a little over 4 hours of focused productivity.

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, should get in your way while you’re in pomodoro mode. Unless your house is on fire, you do what the timer says. If you find yourself getting distracted halfway through a 25-minute sprint, cancel the timer and start again. Just like broken biscuits have no calories, half-finished pomodori do not count.

If you finish your work with time still left on the tomato, per the rules you must keep going. Double check your work. Don’t switch to a new task, just review the task you’re currently on.

If that sounds a bit bonkers to you, you’re not alone. But, them’s the rules.

And speaking of rules, as strict as those focused sprints are, you must also make sure to take your breaks. Apart from just giving it some slack, this strict adherence to down-time teaches your brain that it only has to knuckle down for short periods at a time. If you start skipping breaks, it becomes easier for your brain to procrastinate, because it no longer has any time boundaries in which to stick to a single track.

After you’ve finished four pomodori, take a longer break, for 15 to 30 minutes. You’ll have been going for two hours at that point, and it’ll probably be time for lunch, or second breakfast, or pre-dinner.

Tips and tricks to help you succeed

There are lots of pomodoro style apps you can get for your smartphone or watch. Amazon is full of analog and digital timers you can buy if you prefer to have something physical.

Next up, you need three lists. I suspect over the weeks and months to come, we’ll talk a lot about how you plan your days, but you’ll do well with this technique if you start off with a firm list of the stuff you want to work on, and how many pomodori you’ll need for each task.

Writing a blog post, for example, might be two pomodori. One pomodoro to knock up a quick promo image in Canva. Four pomodori to code up a new feature in your app.

Actually, coding is where this sort of technique works well, because you’re not having to constantly switch between media. Writing is much the same. But if you work in a multimedia environment, you’re probably going to come up against some issues. I’m not gonna leave you hanging on those; we’ll get to them in a bit.

But going back to our lists, for a second. I said you need three lists. There’s your daily todo list, which we’ve just covered, but those tasks are pulled from your inventory. This is the larger list of stuff you need to get done now or later. This is the seemingly inexhaustible list of things you’re supposed to do, which means it’s time for me to remind you once again, you’re never going to get it all done. Your brain is not a good place to keep all those tasks, so best put them down somewhere. Then you can build out each day, and plan your pomodori.

Interruptions and other people

The final list is where interruptions go. Like I said earlier, if your brain pings you with a sudden urge to rewatch a specific YouTube video, or you’ve just thought of a great post for Bluesky, make a note of it in your Interruptions list, then get right back to the job at hand.

Once your timer goes off, check your Interruptions list and see if there’s anything there that actually needs doing. You might find that the urge to watch that video has died down now, and that Bluesky post idea can be added to your inventory, or tacked on to today’s todo list.

The same technique works for interruptions from the outside world. Unless something’s about to actually explode, it can probably wait 25 minutes. That includes your colleagues. OK, Janet from Accounts Receivable really needs you to urgently finish your timesheet. Does it need to be done right this second, or could it wait, like, 15 minutes until you’ve finished the job at hand? It’s probably number two, so back off Janet.

You don’t have to be weird and tell people “I’m stuck in a pomodoro”. You can just say “I’m just in the middle of something right now, but gimme ten minutes and I’ll give you a ring back”.

Who likes this method?

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, and who I’m dubbing patron saint of this podcast – although he’s yet to actively patronise it – wrote in praise of the pomodoro technique back in 2021. It took him a while to figure out what the fuss was about, but it’s from Oliver that I get the notion we’re never going to reach the bottom of our todo lists, so he likes the pomodoro technique because it embraces limitations.

Oliver joins the ranks of authors, entrepreneurs, and productivity experts who like this little tomato. But while on the face of it, the idea of deep focus is a really good one, there are lots of lines of work – creative and otherwise – that just aren’t compatible.

If you like dividing your time up into equal units, or you’re essentially in front of a keyboard all day, the pomodoro technique can be a useful one. It can also be good for learning an instrument or a language. After all, Cirillo used it to help him study for an exam.

Where it presents challenges in creative work

But if your work relies on a degree of flow, stopping arbitrarily every half hour is not ideal. Writing a report at work or even a personal newsletter is the kind of task that can get a little mechanical and methodical, and those bursts of focus can help you power through it.

But if you’re painting a landscape or composing a symphony, like I was hinting at earlier you’re unlikely to settle into that all-important flow state. By the way, we’ll talk about flow state in more detail next week.

But if your work spans different media, like making a YouTube video, you can and should break this job up into smaller increments. Writing the video might take you an hour, so that’s two pomodori. Shooting each scene could be a single pomodoro of 25 minutes. If you find the technique useful and want to stick with it, you’ll get better at estimating how long stuff will take, so you can plan your day with relative accuracy.

But I’m not here to present every idea as one you should adopt. That’d be like studying eighty different ways to boil an egg but never actually getting round to eating one. So if this doesn’t feel like it works for you, no worries. I definitely think it’s worth a try though, especially if you find it hard to focus on boring work, or there’s just something more interesting to do with your time.

And on the face of it, some of these techniques can feel a bit samey, but you’re not a machine. If you can carve up your day so you’ve got a good mix of long and short tasks, that’ll help keep your brain more interested, and thus a little more well-behaved. If you need to write a presentation and it’s going to take you eight pomodori, sprinkle in a couple of other short jobs, like paying some bills, or ideally something fun, like researching your next holiday.

Put it to the test

If you heard last week’s episode about eating your frog, you’ll have heard me talk about planning your day in terms of priority. Well, another way is to plan your day in terms of pomodori. Start with the stuff that’ll give you a head start on the day, plan for a mix of long and short work, and don’t forget to take your breaks.