I guess this will be one of the most controversial posts I have ever written. I will talk about the Pomodoro technique and why I hate it.

First of all, what is that thing?

It’s a method for time management in which we consistently take a break after 25 mins of work.

These breaks are usually small ones, but they’re important to make you more productive and work with higher accuracy by giving up a rest time to your brian

Why I hate it

Pomodoro technique has the main rule:

You can work only 25 minutes on something before taking a break. It’s fine if you want to be more efficient with your time, but that does not allow you to ever work for 40 or 50 minutes on a project before taking a break.

So you have to work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break and so on.

The blunder happened for me when I was doing a creative task such as writing articles, video creation, or any other type of writing.

This 25 mins barrier killed my creativity and actually makes me more unproductive.

When I was writing an article like this one, my mind was in the physiological state of flow.

Taking those mini 5 min breaks after 25 minutes of work was throwing me out of this state.

I was not fully concentrating on what I do,

For example for the first 25 minutes I was writing and thinking about this article. Then, after 25 mins I need to stop, take a break for 5 minutes, then think about what I should write next.

After that, I stop again for 5 minutes, then again and again about what to do next, how to phrase it…. etc. Then I stop again after 25 minutes for another 5-minute break.

This created a consistent loop of endless interruptions that did not let me fully concentrate on what I was doing.

So after a little time of doing the Pomodoro method, my stress level increased as I was never fully present in the task at hand.

This was happening for almost 10 days now until I decided to give it a break and start using this method in the opposite way.

Imitating for my use-case

I started working for 45 mins, 30 mins, 1 hour before stopping or taking a break.

I started figuring out a sweet spot for my work.

I found out that I’m more productive and focused for 40 minutes of intense work on a creative task. Now, I felt a bit relaxed. I keep on doing different experiments.

At last, I figured that 45 mins were a good fit for me. I finally figured out a way that helped me to master or imitate this method for my own use case.

I hope you got some new insights for this article. If you’ve any questions make sure you use the respond button below. I’d love to answer all of them

I originally published this article on medium