I spent much of my time last quarter in Stanford’s CoDA building, doing pomodoros. Pomodoros are a productivity hack that splits up work sessions into typically 25-minute long intervals. While I have fond memories of those times, which facilitated social interaction with friends, I’m not confident that pomodoros increased my productivity at all. They might have had a negative effect.
Some quick thoughts on why.
Importantly, I think the point of structured productivity like pomodoros is NOT to achieve maximum output — it’s to reduce activation energy (get you “unstuck”) and maintain consistency.
That means that you should not always be doing pomodoros. Ideally, you can sit down and do deep work for 1+ hours.
Pomodoros, like most productivity systems, are most effective as a safety net for bad days — the times you’re tired and the least motivated.
Best practices:
Take breaks seriously. Make sure you actually recover. Scrolling does not count as recovering. Walking, talking, and stretching are examples of activities that are actually regenerative. If you skip out on breaks, you’re just imposing costs on your future self. That said, if you feel focused, it seems reasonable to transition to deep work and stop structuring your time. It’s just switching randomly between both that seems bad.
Given that the goal of pomodoros is to reduce activation energy, this suggests you want to pick easier goals, in particular at the beginning of a session. The goal is to build up a success spiral. People really, really suck at estimating task difficulty. It will be demotivating if you set an unreasonable task early on.
It’s best to focus on just one task or project in a pomodoro, and to avoid context-switching. If your tasks regularly aren’t fitting in a given time block, consider switching to another interval.
The prior on your ability to permanently adopt or stick to any habit should be very low. My high school years were littered with various productivity experiments, none of which lasted more than a year. Whether pomodoros or app blockers, be smart about which ones you pick, and intentional in implementing them so that they will be robust over time.