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Comment by such_a_casual | Hacker News Reader

You know, someone has to say it. Working in 25 minute intervals with a 5 minute break is hardly a technique. It doesn't need a name, and it doesn't need an entire page to explain. A to-the-point definition followed by anecdotal commentary would have been far less insulting than the format of this blog post, which basically reads like a diet pill ad.

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Pomodoro saved my butt in college one time, when simply "working hard with breaks" wouldn't have. I had to read a 200 page monograph in a single night and then write a book report on it.

With Pomodoro, I assigned each chapter one "pomodoro" (25-minute time period). At the end of that time, the chapter was done, whether I'd finished it or not. As the timer ticked down, I'd see it out of the corner of my eye and read faster, eventually just skimming the first sentence of each paragraph and maybe soaking in one or two details every couple paragraphs. When each chapter was done, I'd have a rough idea of what the main thrust was, and a fistful of details as well. I'm pretty sure I got a B+ on that book report, but I was just amazed I got it in on time at all.

So in this case, I found it useful as a way to complete a large, boring, segmented task in a quick-and-dirty-but-effective way. I wouldn't recommned it as a cure-all, but it's a good tool to have in your belt for certain kinds of tasks.

I'm doing that this semester with a Tabata timer app - I'd seen my wife workout with one and thought it would be good for textbook skimming. I have the timer ding every 60 seconds, and at that point I'm on the next page (unless I make an exception, which I do at times). It gives me a 10-second break between every page, which I use to finish a sentence, or just redirect my gaze in a new direction. With that kind of intensity you can only do so many pages at a time, so I typically set it to 15 "reps" of this before I take a break.

I find it baffling that you had to do this in the absolute last minute? At best it shows poor planning? At worst a 'I-am-heroic-startup-1-person-army' which burns out so many poor souls. Pardon me if this is incorrect.

That kind of hypothetical analysis is irrelevant in the moment though (similar to sunk costs). Regardless of how you end up finding yourself in a situation where you need to complete a herculean task in a single day, you still need to do it. It doesn't help to place blame at that moment, though of course you should do a post-mortem afterwards and figure out what you can do in the future to prevent it from recurring.

I too ended up in a similar situation in university where I needed to complete a large programming project in a single night, and I did it. Now granted, that was a fault of bad time management on my part, but using disciplined programming I was at least able to recover from it and complete the project. And I have had a few instances in the business world that had similar tight and tough deadlines that were NOT a result of time management failure on my part.

Creating deadlines for work is not revolutionary, original, or insightful even if you give it a cute name. I used to use 45 minute intervals when I used to procrastinate projects. These intervals would be split up into 15|15|15 minute goals and then again into 5|5|5 when necessary. I'm not gonna call myself a genius, give it a cool name, or write a blog post about it because organizing one's time in such a simplistic manner is just not a big deal.

If someone says Pomodoro technique, then I know what they're talking about after two words (one if they're not Italian). It's effective for people discussing it and similar practices. It gives people something concise to search for if they're looking for an app supporting the technique. It benefits people who didn't think to try it themselves (99% of the population).

If there's a problem with blog posts like this one (and especially so for ebooks) it's that they'll feel a need to justify a cost/article by rambling at length when 5-10 bullet points would suffice. Maybe that's what you're unhappy about.

But the problem is not with discussing or coining a name for a method. Countless 'cutely named' methods have been successful in part because of their names, e.g. Crossfit, 7 Minute Workout, 4 Hour Work Week, Five and Two Diet, Paleo Diet, etc.

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