Pomodoro

A quick non-technical post to kick off the new academic year. In short: it can be good to take small breaks regularly.

I’m not a fanatic of “techniques to work efficiently”: most are unconvincing and it’s often dubious what is meant by “efficiency”. But there is one small thing that I do regularly, and makes me happier at the end of the day. It’s called Pomodoro technique, and it’s simply about working in the following schedule:

• Work for 25 minutes;
• Take a 5-minute break;
• Repeat (with a longer break every four cycles or so).

The technique gets its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer used by its “creator” (pomodoro is Italian for tomato).

The specific numbers (25-5) are of course unimportant, but there are two aspects that are good to me:

• It often happens to me that as the hours go by, I’m getting distracted, taking uncontrolled breaks (doomscrolling the news, or getting depressed reading the publication lists of my hyper-productive colleagues); then feeling guilty, and not allowing myself to take a real break. Taking real short breaks regularly is a good way to avoid this downward spiral.

• Cutting time into small periods gives an opportunity to change activity. For example, without a break I can go “I just need a bit more time to finish this” for a full afternoon, while if I realize I have already spend three segments on some non-urgent thing, I can force myself to switch to something else, even if “I just need 5 more minutes”.

I discovered this technique while searching for background music. Some videos are designed to follow the Pomodoro technique, like this one.