Step away from the keyboard! Step AWAY from the keyboard!

The Tomato Timer

Programmers, picture this: You sit down to code, hack at a problem for three hours, consume 20 ounces of black coffee, and are finally forced by the coffee to answer the call of nature.

You get back to your machine, glance at your code, and see a solution almost immediately.

Does the picture seem familiar? If so, then the Pomodoro Technique was designed for you.

YMMV.

I found out about the Pomodoro Technique (a.k.a. the tomato timer) while sifting through my Inbox. Pomodoro is just an alarm that you set when you sit down to work, and that goes off 25 minutes later. You stop work, set the alarm again, for five minutes this time, and take a break until it goes off. Lather, rinse, repeat until you’ve had four 25-minute work sessions, after which you break for 15. For more details, see Wikipedia here.

The technique seemed to be worth a try; I found an implementation I liked at tomato-timer.com. There are of course a lot of timers out there, from cell phone apps to full-fledged GUI programs for your PC, Mac, or Linux box. Tomato-timer.com’s browser-based version is simple and flexible.

Not to make a long story a headache, as my father used to say, here are my findings after using Pomodoro for a few months.

Pomodoro is a great technique for teaching those of us who need to be told when to take a break, when to take a break. For the first few weeks, obey the tomato. Once you’ve learned its lesson, though, you might not need the timer any more. As the weeks passed, I found myself using Pomodoro less and less; now I’ve abandoned it almost completely.

There are plenty of times when you want to work more than 25 minutes at a clip. If you’re starting to get into the zone, you’re only dimly aware of the alarm when it rings, and an hour later you probably won’t remember whether you set it or not.

Now, thanks to Pomodoro, I recognize what it feels like to be overtired. When I notice that I’m not working productively, I force myself to back away from the machine, push the current problem out of my mind, and do something banal like clean those dishes that have been piling up in the sink. The result is that not only am I more productive, but my house is cleaner too!