I’ll admit that when I first encountered the Pomodoro Technique, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Divide your work into 25-minute portions with five-minute breaks between them, measured with a timer. (Originally, a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, hence the name.)
I mean, sure. If you like. Or don’t. What’s the big deal?
It took writing a whole book about the power of embracing your finitude (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) for me to appreciate that there’s something deep and transformative in this approach.
The basic technique goes like this: Figure out the time you have available for work, or housework, or other necessary life tasks. Then divide it into 25-minute increments for deep focus, or “Pomodoros.” After each one, take five minutes off. After four 25-minute Pomodoros, take a longer break.
At the start of each work session, you decide on what you plan to accomplish. There are rules for what to do if you get distracted, or if you underestimate or overestimate how long a task will take.
I’m not suggesting you adopt the technique. My point is that it can be a step on the path toward embracing your limitations. It shows you how to give up the fight against time.
We Are Not Separate From Time
The core misconception in our relationship with time is exacerbated by most productivity advice. We’ve come to see time as something we need to master or conquer. We tend to think of time as a separate “thing,” unlike, say, medieval peasants, who had no such abstract notion.
We feel we’ve got to make the most of our time, or squeeze the most work from it, or use it to get on top of things, or do enough with it to feel a sense of self-worth. Our economic system makes things worse by causing many of us to feel as though we need to achieve this impossible mastery over our time simply to stay afloat.
Sadly, no human being has ever won a fight against time. We all get the limited time we get, along with limited control over it. And if we spend our lives fighting the truth of this situation, all that happens is that we feel more rushed and overwhelmed and impatient. And then one day, time decisively wins the fight — as it was always destined to do. (In other words, we die. It happens to everyone.)
To make the same point in a different way: No one is separate from time. We are all just the sum of the moments of our days. Trying to gain total control over these moments is like the legendary Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair.
Make Time an Ally
Enter the Pomodoro Technique. Its creator, Francesco Cirillo, describes it as a tool for turning time from a “predator” into an “ally.” The idea is not to conquer time by imposing Pomodoros on it. It’s about seeing that, in a certain sense, your day already consists of them.
You have a certain number of 25-minute chunks available for work, unfolding one after the other until it’s time to pick up the kid from preschool or make dinner or go to bed.
The Pomodoro Technique is just a way of becoming more conscious of what’s already true — that your time is fixed, finite, given, un-pause-able. It’s also a tool for making slightly wiser decisions about how you spend your time, knowing that there’ll still be, theoretically at least, a million things left undone at the end of the day.
All you really need to do (because it’s genuinely all you can do) is use the next 25 minutes in the most worthwhile, feasible way. Then repeat.
This explains a crucial but lesser-known rule of the technique: If you assign a Pomodoro to a given task but finish early — perhaps your goal of, say, making notes on a book chapter took less time than you predicted — you are not to move on to the next task nor end the Pomodoro early.
That leads to a resumption of the fight against time, and the secret deluded hope of someday getting on top of it all. Instead, you can use any remaining minutes to review your work, and to get comfortable with the impatience you’ll inevitably feel about not hurrying onward.
On the other side of the discomfort of accepting your limitations comes liberation. And, for that matter, a lot more productivity. Stepping into finitude is a relief. You get to drop the futile quest to do something no human could ever do — attain a position of mastery and dominance over time. You can work with it instead.
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