This machine kills task lists
By Kane Daniel
Directions for use of tomato timer in application of the pomodoro technique:
1. Behold the tomato.
2. Reckon with the tomato.
3. Engage in some light small talk with the tomato. The tomato will not answer. Your objective is to detect—via social cues or subtle behavioural significations—whether it is a tomato (fruit) or tomato (timer). If it is food, prepare it in a light meal. If it is a timer, proceed to the next step.
4. Exert power over the tomato by performing a series of dominance signals (ear pinning, growling, chest beating, pheromone discharging).
5. Feel your mind sink to your guts. Observe the resulting gut–brain hybrid spill between your toes and onto the floor. This mental and physical collapse has occurred because you need to write something.
6. Don’t panic: this is natural.
7. I said don’t panic. This is just like you, Steve. This is why your job at your sister’s wedding was ‘Having a Good Attitude’.
8. Punish yourself for being an incompetent hack. Even your grocery lists would be criticised for being ‘jumbled, workmanlike shit shows with third-act problems’ by the Embarrassing Grocery List Quarterly. Sob gently. As you do, let your eyes drift towards the tomato.
9. Hustle up a knowing smirk. A little something that says, ‘Hold on a minute—here’s an idea.’
10. Pick up the tomato.
11. Turn the top hemisphere of the tomato one whole rotation in a clockwise direction. This is a necessary step. Don’t be the person who can’t operate a novelty timer—that’s gonna make you feel worse.
12. If you think it’s important, read the theory behind the pomodoro technique. The detailed, letter-of-the-law stuff. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re transmitting the basics — the slap on the ass and the go get ’em tiger we believe in you.
13. Turning the tomato anticlockwise, set it to ring after 25 minutes.
14. Perform 25 minutes of undistracted, uninterrupted work. This is like saying, ‘Impose your will upon all heavendom; make God jig and reel to a merry waltz.’ But, friendo, you gotta try. The point old mate Francesco Cirillo, inventor of the pomodoro technique, makes is that we understand time in two different ways: as a ‘becoming’ and as a succession of events. The former is time as a line—never-ending, abstract. The latter is you knowing that as sure as eggs is eggs, after you make an omelette with the ones in the back of the fridge there are gonna be consequences. The point? When doing a thing is situated inside infinity, every second you aren’t productive is anxiety-making and every second you are feels futile. But if you unmoor productivity from the temporal, make it about a rhythm of successive events, it’ll feel as inevitable as egg farts. As stupid as it seems, ‘do work’ is much harder than ‘do work but let a plastic dingus call the shots’. ¹
15. After 25 minutes you will hear an alarm. Do not be alarmed by the alarm.
16. Guess what, sport? You just did a pomodoro and earnt yourself a three-to-five-minute break. Maybe use it to consider that this wouldn’t have caught on if it were called the ‘tomato technique’. Think about all the other ways you resent Italians. Stretch.
17. Go to step 10 unless you have gone to step 10 three times prior. If you have, proceed to the subsequent step. Do four pomodoros, is what I’m saying.
18. Take a longer break. Let’s say around 15 to 30 minutes. Have a snack. Got a ruinous addiction? Place that bet, fix that drink. I’m here to tell you about the tomato thing, not put your life back together.
19. Keep riding the merry-go-round until the thing you’re doing is done. Which may be soon or it may be never. The point is that you’re trying. Which, sometimes, is the most we can ask of ourselves.
It so happens that we sell tomato timers in our online shop. If you buy one, you’ll receive these ‘directions for use’ printed on handsome yellow paper, folded in a complicated manner and packaged with your tomato in a cardboard box.
Kane Daniel eats a cookie every time someone follows him on Twitter. He’s dying of starvation and you’re to blame.
¹ Yes, yes. The pomodoro technique’s disassociation from temporality uses temporal markers. You win a ‘Number One Champion of Thinking’ sticker and a voucher for a 30-minute discussion of Heidegger’s Being and Time with the father figure you always wanted but never had.
