#teachingisfun

I’ve tried the Pomodoro technique before, and I hated it!

Now, I love it because I’ve learned to tell it to “shut the fuck up.”

The classic idea is simple: you focus on one task for 25 minutes, the timer goes off, you take a short break, and then you repeat. Nowadays, there are apps where you can choose different chunks of time for work and breaks. For example, the app I’ve got offers focus sessions of 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes, etc., or you can customise them. The suggested breaks are 5, 10, or 15 minutes, or you can customise those too.

[A moment of history:

Francesco Cirillo developed the technique as a university student in the late 1980s, using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — hence the name pomodoro, which means “tomato” in Italian.]

Almost four decades later, this technique is still alive and well. I don’t know about you, but my attention span is like Dory’s.

Every time I finally got properly focused on something, a timer would tell me to stop. Take a break. Come back later.

But I didn’t want a break. I was working! I was concentrated. Why would I deliberately interrupt that? So, I gave up quickly. I simply realised that it didn’t work for me. Why suffer?!

Not long ago, I got a new laptop, and I was struggling to figure out how to use it, as it’s my first-ever MacBook. I desperately wanted to see a clock on my screen. Accidentally, I found a Pomodoro app. I gave it a try.

The Pomodoro technique is almost 40 years old. I tried it about 8 years ago. And here I am, using it again in 2026.

To be honest, I hate the 25-minute rule for the tasks I do. Of course, if you do something rather quickly, it may work. So, most of the time, I set a 45-minute timer. When it tells me to take a break and I’m in the middle of a task, I tell it out loud to shut the fuck up and restart the 45-minute loop.

When I’m working, I can easily lose track of time. This flaw of mine came to me when the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out in 2022. The first three months seemed and felt like one day.

That’s why I’m learning how to feel time again. So far, not very successfully — it’s been four years. But I’m not giving up on it.

I can sit down to do one thing and suddenly realise that much more time has passed than I thought.

The timer gives me a little checkpoint — you’ve been working for 45 minutes. It’s a reminder to pee (don’t laugh), fill my water bottle, stand up and move my body, or tell the timer to shut up.

I am the one who gets to decide.

Nowadays, I believe that productivity techniques don’t need to be followed perfectly. Regular physical workouts have taught me a very important thing: listen to your body. You should finish your workout without feeling like you’re about to die or drop dead. You should have some energy left afterwards.

I think the same principle can be applied to productivity techniques. They are supposed to help you, not make you suffer because you’re trying to follow the rules perfectly.

Pomodoro is worth trying with different time durations. Play with it and see if you can benefit from it.

I don’t know if I’ll still be using it in two years, but I know that, right now, I love it.