The Pomodoro Technique
How an idea inspired by a little tomato keeps my production high
This is one of my periodic “Tools of the Trade” pieces, which looks at something that has helped me in my writer’s journey. Sometimes they’re specific to erotica, sometimes they’re more general; this one, I think, applies well to anyone who has to do focused work, writing or otherwise. If you like this sort of thing, become a free subscriber here and get notified whenever I’ve got something to say (typically a couple times a week). You can also support me by buying my books, or subscribing on SubscribeStar or Ream.
“How do you do it, Cornelia?” I imagine some of you asking. “You’ve written over 637,000 words since March (‘War and Peace’ only has about 587,000), and put over 30 titles out on Amazon, Smashwords, and other platforms; you’re churning out at least a couple titles a month, not to mention the things you publish on Medium, and your useful little essays here on Substack. What witchy magic powers your tremendous output?”
(I realize none of you are actually asking these questions; as you should know by now, I have quite an imagination …)
And so I shall tell you, my imaginary interrogatory — I have three secrets:
I have an incredibly filthy mind. Writer’s block is not a problem for me: once I started down this path, I found myself careening from one sexy notion to the next, and my stories have gotten spicier as I go. (Have you checked out “Crammed at the Christmas Craft Fair” yet? We get into some wax play between Vickie and Cade that is not to be missed …)
These are not, gentle reader, especially good words. According to my count, 1,352 of my published words (roughly 0.24%) are “fuck,” “fucking,” or “fucked”, and that doesn’t include variations like “fuuuck” and “fuuuuck” which some of my characters have been known to moan in extremis. And while I think there’s some good writing scattered among those stories (reading over “A Siren’s Tales,” I’m very proud of some of the sensuous descriptions of food and baths in those stories), we’re not talking Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner levels of prose style.
I have a little timer that keeps me on track.
It’s the little timer that has been the real key to me becoming a juggernaut of independent smut publishing. Without it, I’d be flitting and floating from task to task, unable to focus long enough to get the sexy words in my head out onto the screen of my NovelPad document so I can push them into your head and hopefully infect you with the naughty thoughts that plague me. It’s a simple technique that anyone can use, for any kind of task: The Pomodoro Technique.
I first stumbled on this simple focus tool when my day job involved a lot of heads-down coding. I worked in an office then, a little cubicle farm where other turnips developers were working on different parts of the same project. And while it was useful to chatter among ourselves about the work, the chatter could get distracting, too. I stumbled on Francesco Cirillo’s simple little technique, named for his plastic tomato kitchen timer, and it made my focus so much better. When office closures and, later, the pandemic, drove me to the home office, where distractions like laundry, dogs, and kitchen chores abounded, it became even more important. Now I can’t imagine functioning without.
The technique is very simple, which is what makes it powerful:
Decide on the task that you’re going to focus on — just one task, because multitasking is a lie.
Set a timer for 25 minutes, and do just that task. Don’t look up even to check the timer; it’s just 25 minutes, and while that will seem like a long time at first, it’s actually pretty short.
When time is up, take a 5 or 10 minute break. Stretch, check your email, hit the restroom, grab a snack — let your mind address all the distractions you’ve been pushing aside. But just for that 5-10 minute period.
Repeat. If you’ve finished the original task, pick a new one; if you have work to do on the last task, pick up where you left off.
After four of these work/break units (called “pomodoros” among the cognizeti), take a longer break, typically 20-30 minutes. This is when you can grab your lunch, take a walk, move the wash to the dryer, etc.
Repeat the process for another hour of focused productivity.
Over the years, I’ve had the classic pomodoro timer, an app on my phone, a website or two with timers, even a little Visual Basic widget I threw together and that talked back to our ticketing system’s API so I could automatically toss a comment into the tracker at the end of each cycle. Today I have an app on my watch that gives me a gentle buzz on my wrist each time a pomodoro stage is concluded. But really, the tooling is unimportant and can be as low tech as like; if anything, low tech is the best tech for following this method.
Selecting the task to focus on is important, as it should be big enough to fill out that 25 minute block. If I have a lot of smaller tasks I’ll sometimes bundle them, but that can get tricky, as it’s the context switching that kills the flow. Instead, I like to tackle a couple of small tasks before I do the big sprints, and then knock out the rest when I’ve gone through a few rounds. In addition to sustained writing of the actual words I’m selling, I like to use a pomodoro cycle for things like working on my newsletter, making a book cover, or scheduling a promotion. Telling my brain that we’re going to do this one thing and one thing only, but also striking the bargain that we’ll get to the other stuff eventually, is key to the technique’s success.
The Pomodoro Technique is a great guard against distraction, which I define as the things our brain will turn to in an attempt to avoid boredom, which is our deepest, darkest fear. The contemporary world is full of distraction, oh so many of them sitting right on the same tool we use to get our work done. When I’ve got NovelPad open, there’s often a tab to Smutlandia, Twitter/X, or Discord snuggled up right against it, tempting me to glance their way; it’s also very easy to hop over to KDP or D2D in the hopes that someone has bought one of my books, or Medium to see if someone has read one of my stories. Those are all such fast, easy hits of dopamine compared to the much harder slog of putting down the words that I’m hoping to send into the world. Reminding myself that it’s just 25 minutes of work before I can get that hit helps immensely.
What it doesn’t guard against, alas, is interruption, which I define as the exterior attempts to derail our productivity. During my writing hours, those are limited mostly to my dogs, who often demand a walk when I’m in the middle of a good sprint, or my husband, wondering where his socks have disappeared to (usually they’re under the bed). At work, it was easy to control interruptions in the early days when it was analog and organic chatter that was the biggest threat: when my whole team was on board with the technique, we got into a nice rhythm of quiet work and friendly banter during the pomodoro cycle. Now, with the ubiquity of things like Microsoft Teams (which I absolutely hate with the burning rage of a thousand suns), I find the day job interruptions more difficult to manage. If people barged into my old cubicle within inane problems they could be solving for themselves with the frequency with which they make that stupid little Teams window light up now, there would have been blood on the floor. Not to mention the dings and prompts and messages that my workstation makes on its own, letting me know when a program needs to be updated or flashing some pointless news headline that refuses to be suppressed. But I digress …
If you’re having trouble making progress on some big project, I highly recommend dipping your toe into the tomato sauce to see if it might help. Every brain is different, so yours may not respond like mine has to the pomodoro rhythm, but it’s an easy hack to try, and you may just find a tiny bit of focus is enough to get your work back on track.
tomato photo by Ed O'Neil on Unsplash
sexy model (who appears in a different pose on “A Siren’s Tales”) from Deposit Photos