Diarized
The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique breaks work into fixed intervals, traditionally twenty-five minutes, each followed by a short break. Francesco Cirillo named it in the late 1980s after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used as a student. One completed interval is the unit of work, and you keep a count of them.
Also called: pomodoro, the tomato technique
Where it goes wrong
The counting is the half that gets dropped, and it was the point. Cirillo uses the tally to learn how many intervals a task really costs, which is the only defence against optimistic estimates the method offers. Without it you have a twenty-five minute timer, and twenty-five minutes is an arbitrary length that suits shallow work and cuts everything else in half.
Diarized schedules the work you already keep in a to-do app into the calendar you already use, and shows you why every block landed where it did.