Introduction
The work that gets us noticed in our career is deep, intelligent, and thought-provoking. It is not filing. It is not responding to emails either.
If we are knowledge workers, then our mental resources are what got us hired & are what will get us promoted. We need them to be fully operational and firing at their best if we are to achieve our potential.
We know that distractions break focus. We know that multi-tasking is disastrous for efficiency & productivity. What if there were a simple tool to remedy both of these at a stroke?
Enter ‘The Pomodoro Technique’.
In case you haven’t heard of it already, this is a method for organizing your time into 25 minute blocks. It was devised in the 1980s by university student Francesco Cirillo, who used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to split up his study time. Giving ourselves manageable blocks of time to work eliminates distraction & procrastination, reduces stress, and increases focus and productivity.
Why does it work?
Consider a racetrack. To get from point A to point B as quickly and as efficiently as possible we smooth the way, remove any obstacles and have clear markings on the floor so we know where we are going. We add barriers to prevent us going off-track.
Office work today often feels more like a ramble into the unknown, over uneven terrain. We are focussed and diligent one minute, chatty and relaxed the next. We travel aimlessly from one task to another, and prolong this trek for an indeterminate duration until we decide we have done enough.
Pomodoro working is a single-tasking-pure-focus-mode for a clearly determined period without deviating.
Pomodoros are a good way to ensure we get breaks, too. Many of us need prompts before we take health advice like getting some steps in, and breaking eye contact with the screen, which we are recommended to do for 5-10 minutes every hour.
Breaks can also be very good for our productivity. Our brains work well in sprints but can get fatigued. If we expect them to work for long durations without a break then mistakes can creep in. Breaks are also a great way to return to focus if we are distracted by the niggling discomfort of not having checked our emails or our mobile phones lately. That sense of “What am I missing…” can become very distracting so it is good to discharge this anxiety in the 5 minute slots between pomodoros. “…oh, nothing much, back to work….”
Without the framework of a timer it becomes very easy to tell yourself you’ll get into deep work “right after this chat, it could be important, right after the chat, a quick coffee run, and a toilet break, and check my phone, and all too soon you have pushed back the window of working efficiently by a further 20 minutes or more just preparing the space for the actual work.
You look at the calendar & there isn’t time to start on a big project before the next meeting, so you stick to clerical or admin work to keep busy until after the meeting. After meeting it will be time for lunch!
I’m sure everybody has days like these, when 2 or 3 hours have passed & all of the work we have managed to achieve is shallow & administrative, light and breezy, like responding to emails, providing updates, clearing our inboxes and dealing with minutiae.
In fact, I know we have days like this, as the research has been done.
Time Magazine estimated the typical worker is interrupted 7 times per hour, or 56 times a day(!), which is estimated to cost us 2 hours in lost productivity every single day. Almost 90% of office workers will admit to wasting at least 30 minutes each day, but unless they are using software to measure it, it is likely that their estimates will be under-calling it significantly.
It has been variously estimated that 2.9 hours per day are wasted, or that when you total up the interruptions, email replies, social breaks, mobile phone notifications and so on, office workers actually squander over 4 HOURS per day(!). Asana surveyed 10,600 workers & found 58% spent over half their day on unproductive activities & ‘busy work’ A poll of 1,989 office workers concluded that less than 3 hours per day were productive hours.
Valuable work
Estimates vary because the actual figure will obviously be incredibly difficult to pin down, but since the audience for this site is not slackers anyway our main concern is not reducing slack time, but improving the quality of our hours spent working.
How do you measure how ‘worthwhile’ any particular hour was, even if we know that technically keys were being struck and ‘work’ was being done? About half of the UK workforce are knowledge workers, but ask yourself when was the last time that you really had time to think at work? If you were designing a workspace for yourself to optimise your output – how much would it resemble your actual workspace?
The 8 hour work day itself is a hangover from the 19th century and is usually adopted at the default unthinkingly regardless of how appropriate it is to the volume of output, the nature of the work, or the number of employees.
Whenever studies have been done to evaluate whether the 40 hour work week is arbitrary. The answer has come back in the affirmative.
A 4 year study in Iceland published by the thinktank Autonomy found that productivity remained stable or increased when working hours were reduced to 35 or 36. Microsoft Japan famously trialled a four day week & saw productivity rise a staggering 40%, though the experiment was short-lived.
The 40 hours a week benchmark in this day and age certainly demonstrates the truth of Parkinson’s Law, that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. In summary, if you give me 2 hours or if you give me 30 days to complete a task the result is likely to be similar. Deadlines get results. And what are pomodoros, after all, but a series of chunked-up deadlines?
Pomodoros are a robust method for building momentum and reinforcing your self image as a worker who gets things done, with the neurochemical rewards and stress reductions that follow.
Leveraging the Ziegarnik effect
Ticking off a completed task means it gets shelved & that portion of your brain is freed up for something else. The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon that explains how incomplete tasks linger in our minds. Waiters remember orders only until they are complete. Journalists are mini-experts in a field until the copy is filed, then it is all forgotten.
Narrative cliff-hangers leave us psychologically unsatisfied, and we want to continue to read, which is why loose ends in storylines bug us on some level. We want all the loose ends to be resolved. Incomplete tasks mount up and and lead to our feeling overwhelmed. It is far more stressful to have incomplete tasks ahead of us than to be working hard on something, even though neglecting work sounds like we are giving ourselves an easy time. Our brains are optimised for being on and off, concentrating hard, then forgetting about it. Once a task is ticked off we cut the ‘mental drag’ effect of ill-defined stress linked to the work that remains to be done.
When our to-do list jobs remain ‘to-do’ because we started something, shelved it, moved on to something else, we don’t really forget about it, it tugs at us and refuses to go away until we tick it off. It is pervasive & draining to start and not finish, but as the day wears on we have less mental energy to grasp the nettle & finish these dragons off, they fester. You get that frazzled, overwhelmed feeling when you list all of the things that you still need to get done and feel drained just thinking about it.
Trying to hold a conversation AND get our work done is a kind of multi-tasking, where we just burn precious resources keeping multiple tabs open in our brains, and waste too long on our tasks, so the to-do list accumulates and we become mentally exhausted. We make it a lot easier on ourselves by committing to one thing at a time, burning through the work with the full glare of our complete focus, then moving smoothly to the next job.
Setting up
Prepare for a pomodoro session by silencing your phone, putting it in power saving mode, and putting it out of the way. Disable email notifications, and close /minimise your emails. Close every file but the ones you are working on.
You are now ready to give your best work for a manageable period of time and see how quickly your workload diminishes. Musical pomodoro tracks can be helpful to keep pace. Music is also a good way to shut out distractions if your work setting is not optimal. Sometimes there is no silencing office noise or traffic sounds.
A deep work mental state takes time to enter initially but it gets quicker with practice & conditioning yourself with place and music makes it more automatic.
The first time you try it, it is like trying to dive deep from the surface of the sea, trying to force yourself down when your brain keeps looking for ways to keep you surfaced in the here & now. With practice it is effortless and as soon as you put your headphones in or get your head down & into the session, you start to sink deeper into work. If it is the same YouTube video or piece of music each time then the music conditions you, like Pavlov’s dog. There are countless timer playlists pre-recorded on YouTube, on Spotify and other platforms.
If your work environment allows for it and you use headphones & ambient music as the pomodoro timer try using one which is visual without being distracting, such as a countdown clock, in order to keep in front of mind how many minutes remain until the end of the session.
Achieving a flow state demands focus at the outset, above all else you must prioritize it, and make sure conditions are right. You put yourself in the right setting, assume the right attitude, exclude all distractions, put a piece of work in front of yourself that is the right level of challenge – difficulty & duration. Having a pomodoro timer helps with several of these, duration, attitude & distractions.
When you know it is only a focussed burst, when you know that this piece of work will be finished or else substantially reduced it motivates you, combats procrastination. You work even harder during the second half of the pomodoro period than you do in the first, because you are in a deeper state, which feels good, and because you are running out of time, so you want to complete THIS task without leaving anything half finished.
If the going is good, you can of course drag the timer back 10 minutes and prolong the state until the task is completed to your satisfaction, don’t let anything be rushed or half finished for want of time, but don’t neglect the breaks either. Your work day is a marathon of sprints, so take the breaks between the sessions seriously & don’t fly straight into the next one. Toilet breaks, coffee, white space, maintaining good relations in the office, all these matter too, just not at the expense of your work. Honouring the 5 minute breaks ensures that you don’t end up socialising, making coffee, or taking comfort breaks during the 25 minute working blocks.
Making Adjustments
Classic pomodoro technique is 25 minutes on 5 minutes off but a lot of seasoned practitioners have personalised the practice by adjusting the time periods. 52/17 is popular, as is 45/15. You may have heard of ‘animedoro‘ which leverages the focussing power of cartoons!
I personally have my own favourite too but I don’t think any of these ‘refinements’ undermine the original 25/5 at all, they still observe the structure and the core processes of the original; single-tasking and setting mini-deadlines throughout the day.
I wouldn’t muddy the water experimenting with the durations too much initially. If you are new to the practice then establishing a routine is much more important than tweaking the times. Besides, 25/5 fits neatly into your calendar, which will be divided into 30 minute blocks, and 25/5 is by far the most common time period for apps, and playlists. I’d stick with 25/5 initially & only tweak it later as you become comfortable with it.
Making it work for you
Try completing 10 of these pomodoros in a working day, with a break of 5 minutes between each, and a longer break after completing four. Tally them on your whiteboard or jotter as the day wears on. If there are meetings, lunches etc you’ll realize how difficult it actually is to get 10.
It is only 5 hours of actual working, which does not sound like a lot, but 5 hours of focussed work burns through work far more rapidly than 8 hours of muddling and multi-tasking.
Keep a jotter beside the desk – your focussed brain often kicks out inspired insights, ideas & solutions when you are focussed hard on something else – this can be distracting. Jot it down and come back to it later. Don’t dwell on it or you’ll lose your thread, just get it out onto paper & pick up where you left off.
Try leaving your last time block the day blank so that you can play catch up on any ad-hoc tasks, 2 minute jobs or inspired ideas that came to you mid-session. Schedule them in as dedicated pomodoros if you think they have value. You can also squeeze in several smaller tasks like sending chaser emails, checking share prices, or any other 2-minute admin that would not be enough to dedicate a single 25-minute block. This is not the purist’s pomodoro, which is single-tasking but instead is a form of batching. Sweeping up to keep your time slots clear. If you inadvertently finish a task early and have 5-10 minutes free you can tick a couple of tasks off this list.
Over time you gradually get better at judging how long it takes to complete a task, especially if you use the same audio background and have a visual pomodoro in front of you while you work. So when you come to the end of your day & start to schedule all of the work for tomorrow into your calendar alongside scheduled meetings, lunch etc… (we have an article on this site with recommendations for how to construct your when-to-do list) you get very good at giving yourself the right amount of work to put in each time slot.
One of the biggest side benefits of pomodoros is just how good it feels. It gives you a real mood boost – after a few minutes into your session you see the distractions pop up either externally or in your brain and you wryly dismiss them, knowing that you are on a mission and that performance-enhancing neurochemistry is starting to flow.
You come to appreciate how, counterintuitively, working hard & fast is far less draining than being half-committed to your work- you are finished quicker, for one thing, your body is producing reward chemicals to maintain your interest.
You build momentum and the question becomes not ‘how am I going to get all this done’ which can be overwhelming, but ‘what am I going to do with all of this free time to advance my career?’ which is empowering, and demonstrates progress.
Wrapping up
This is an incredibly powerful tool in the pursuit of focused, efficient work. By embracing structured intervals and intentional breaks, we complete work far faster without exhausting our mental resources. We enhance our own productivity, which allows us to reclaim valuable time for longer-term goals, and experience far less stress. Try it out, let it redefine your work habits, and join those who witnessed a transformative impact on their careers and well-being.