Well, I can’t leave the Pomodoro alone.  I can’t live without it, but I can’t entirely live with it.

The Pomodoro Technique is a method for pacing out work.  You divide up a big task into 25-minute blocks of effort.  You work away at the task for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break.  Each of these is a Pomodoro, or a Pomo for short.

Every four Pomo’s you take a longer break, either a full Pomo or 15 minutes, depending on whom you read.

That’s it.  Oh, if you want you can time yourself with a “real” Pomodoro timer, depicted above.  But there are boatloads of apps and webapps as well.

What’s the virtue?

Well, I think it’s terrific for pacing out a big task.  Need to work on your book for four hours?  8 pomos with associated breaks.

You work away like King Birtram of the King’s Stilts:

Naturally, the King never wore his stilts during business hours.  When King Birtram worked, he really worked, and his stilts stood forgotten in the tall stilt closet in the castle’s front hallway.

The King’s Stilts, Dr. Suess

So you work really hard for 25 minutes, and then you do nothing having to do with the work for a five-minute break (ditto for the long break).

In fact, you’re not supposed to do much of anything absorbing during the break; it’s to recharge, not to get stuff done.

If you do this — if you dutifully work hard during the push and recharge during the break — then you will able to continue with a tough or daunting or mind-numbing job for longer than you would if you tried to bull straight through.

The rub — for me at least — comes with tasks that don’t match or exceed the 25-minute limit.

What if you have four short tasks?

The stock Pomo advice is to batch them together into a Pomo.

Oh, and if you finish a Pomo before you finish the task (like your last Pomo)?  You’re supposed to mull over the task until the Pomo is done.

There’s more to the system.  You’re supposed to start each day with a day’s worth of tasks, and then analyze at the end of the day how you did.  Which tasks took longer than you thought.  Which tasks took less time.

Here’s how I use it.  In the morning I look at the things I would like to do during the day and scope them out in Pomos.  I fill the day with Pomo-sized blocks of time — every block — and fill out a special calendar full of Pomos.  This is the plan.

Then as I do my work during the day I move things over from Pomo to actual calendar, taking account of what happened when.  At the end of the day I have a calendar full of the things I thought I would do and a calendar full of the things I actually did.  Pomo by Pomo.

It sounds like a big hassle but it actually doesn’t add that much overhead to my day.

I guess I’m getting better at estimating how many Pomos things will take to do.  I BS myself less about how long things will take.  Both ways: how long they will take and how short they will take.  So I have a pretty good idea what I can accomplish in a day, and a fair idea of what I can accomplish in a week.

It’s like a system I used to use when I wrote software, where I would break my work down into half-day sized tasks and then add up how many of them there were on my schedule.  I was pretty good at that.

The fly in the ointment is the sub-Pomo tasks and the not-quite-finished-with-a-Pomo tasks.  I sort of see the point to it.  But not really.  You’re supposed to sit around the think for the rest of your last Pomo?  Really?  What for?  Sometimes I do do that, just to get closure on a big task I’ve finished, but other times I just want to push back and take my break early.

I figure I need something to link my aims to my effort.  Pomo isn’t perfect, but I have yet to find something better.

Have you?