The Reverse Pomodoro Technique

Glaucia Esppenchutz
2 min readFeb 25, 2023

Recently I faced burnout and had to slow down all my activities for almost three weeks. It is not the first time this has happened, but it is the first time I learned how to return to my normal routine, avoiding going back to that hole of tiredness. Besides other changes in my routine, a game changer was the reverse pomodoro technique.

At some point in your life, you may have heard about the Pomodoro Technique. The concept is simple: select a task, set a timer of 25 minutes, and take a 5-minute break. After your break, you repeat the cycle, either continuing your task or starting a new one if you finished the first one. Most people recommend repeating the cycle four times, so you have two hours dedicated to it.

Picture with three tomato timers
Pomodoro timers

It is a good habit if you have problems concentrating on one task at a time or want a boost of productivity. The point is not to rush to finish your task or something else but to train yourself to focus on something and reward yourself with some minutes to relax.

However, when recovering from burnout, or in my case, an autistic burnout (I will make a separate post for it), 25 minutes can be mentally exhausting. That’s when the reverse pomodoro saved me!

As the name suggests, the goal with the reverse pomodoro is to set a timer to 5 minutes to work on something, have 25 minutes to relax your mind, and repeat the cycle. Even though it seems silly, it helped me to work on something slowly and gave my mind extra time to rest and recover.

Actually, this is a good strategy for people with chronic health problems, anxiety, depression, or with neurodivergence (ADHD, Autism…). It allows the person to see progress on daily tasks, even in little steps and gives time to the brain to recover.

Person relaxing while seating in a sofa

Some apps help you set the pomodoro timer, but you can also set it on your phone as I do.

While there is little research and adopters of this technique yet, there is a good and detailed explanation on the blog page of the Tiimo app about how it can help.

Hope this helps you at some point!

--

--

Glaucia Esppenchutz
Glaucia Esppenchutz

Written by Glaucia Esppenchutz

DataOps engineer at AiFi, writting about software engineering and my Autistic life.