Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management way of doing something developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals. Typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

Each interval is known as a pomodoro. From the Italian word for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used while he was a university student. Apps and websites providing timers and instructions have widely popularized the technique.

Closely related to concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development used in software design. The way of doing something has been adopted in pair programming contexts.