Mechanical red tomato kitchen timer set to 30 minutes

Maybe it’s the heatwave, maybe it’s my terrible summer sleeping pattern – recently, I’ve been struggling to focus on pretty much anything.

The 3pm slump has been worse than usual. Email lines blur into grey smudges: I sit down to write and end up toggling from tab to tab like an unenthusiastic chimp swinging onto unrelated, unproductive lianas.

In other words, I’ve been in real need of a better way to stay “switched on” during the day in the past couple of weeks or so.

Enter: the Pomodoro technique, invented by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.

How does the “Pomodoro technique” work?

The method, which originally relied on a kitchen timer (I use my phone) is meant to break work into 25-minute segments.

After that, you take a break, or “pomodoro.”

The word, which is Italian for “tomato,” is a

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