How the Pomodoro Technique Can Boost Creativity

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been writing for an hour or two, and you’re starting to lose focus? The words aren’t coming as quickly as you wish, yet you want to push ahead and finish that scene or chapter. When you write like this, you struggle against the inertia that develops as you tire, and your creativity may take the back seat as you strive to reach your goal.

Sometimes you’re in the zone, but if you push too hard, you lose that increased energy and creativity. The Pomodoro Technique may help you develop a rhythm for your writing sessions, enhancing your creativity and productivity.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

In the 1980s, Francesco Cirillo was a university student. He was finding it difficult to maintain his concentration though all the reading he needed to do, and was looking for a way to study more efficiently. He used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomorodo is Italian for tomato) to structure his study periods, breaking his time into work periods and breaks. He eventually settled on segments of 25 minutes as optimal work periods and five minutes for breaks.

It’s that simple. 25 minutes on, five minutes off. Start a timer when you sit down to write, and when the timer goes off, take a short break.

Why the Pomodoro Technique works

While this technique isn’t for everyone, there are a number of reasons why it can work for many people. First, it removes that chasm of despair that writers sometimes face when they sit down to write. Instead of thinking that they’ve got a life sentence in front of a blank page or screen, the awareness that they only have to work for 25 minutes can feel like a reprieve. They don’t feel forced to produce a lot, just enough to finish the session and move on to the next.

The five-minute breaks are not just rewards for completing a session, but also a way to reset the mind, to think about something other than the work, so when you sit back down, your mind is fresh again.

Reducing the long work of writing into manageable sessions makes it feel different; your goal isn’t to get to your 80,000-word target, but just to get to the end of the next session. And these sessions add up. Many writers find that their word count increases when working like this.

Of course, you still may want to track your word count every writing session, and Scrivener has your back.

How to use the Pomodoro Technique

First, you need a timer. Cirillo used a kitchen timer, and the only disadvantage of his tomato-shaped timer is that, as an analog device, it probably ticked; that would be too distracting for many people. You can buy a digital kitchen timer, or use the clock app on your computer, phone, or smartwatch. Or you can use the web app on the Pomodoro Technique website.

There are plenty of apps you can buy designed for use with this technique, but some of them are overkill, presenting graphs and tables showing how much you work. While they offer a level of rigidity that you don’t get with a manual timer, you might prefer the flexibility of taking more flexible breaks. After all, it can take more than five minutes to use the bathroom and make a cup of tea.

If you follow the technique as designed, here’s your schedule for your first writing session.

During short breaks, you could make a cup of tea or coffee, go to the bathroom, or have a quick snack. At the end of the two-hour cycle, you could take a longer break to have a meal, take a short walk, or do something to distance yourself from your writing. You may not go back to work after that; you may have errands to do or other tasks that need completing. But after lunch, you could do another cycle, or even two, depending on how much time you have.

You’ll likely be much more productive during your writing sessions, and when you return to writing after a break, you will not have totally lost the thread of what you were working on before you paused. In fact, your unconscious mind was probably working while you weren’t.

You don’t have to always adhere to the schedule rigidly. You may be at the end of a chapter or scene, and know that you won’t be writing any more that day, and choose to go over by ten or fifteen minutes. This technique is not meant to force you to fit your writing into an inflexible schedule, but rather to help you improve your productivity by not overtaxing your brain and giving it frequent rest periods. It’s easy to keep slogging on when you’re writing, thinking that you have to hit your daily writing goal. But when you write like that, you’re less likely to do your best work. We tend to believe the commonplace that “writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent transpiration,” but that’s not true for everyone.

The Pomodoro technique isn’t for everyone. You may not think most creatively in 25-minute sessions, and it may take you a half hour just to get your brain into writing mode. You may find that 25 minutes is too short or too long; we all have different thinking and working styles. Nothing is stopping you from trying other rhythms. You could do 50 minutes of work followed by a 10-minute break each hour, for example. Or you may find that more long breaks work better for you, so you can take walks and boost your creativity.

Try the Pomodoro Technique and see if it helps you be more creative. Don’t be afraid to tweak the schedule; find what works best for you. It might not help you, but it’s worth a try.