Pomodoro Session Planner

When you would use this

Four pomodoros sounds like two hours and is not. Twenty five and five, four times, is one hundred and fifteen minutes rather than a hundred and twenty, because the break after the last round does not happen. That is the one thing this gets right that most planners do not. A session ends on work. Including a trailing break inflates every answer by the length of one break, which is small enough to look plausible and large enough to make you late. The rest is laying the blocks out against a clock. Give it a start time and it prints each round and each break with the times they run between, so a session can be checked against a meeting rather than against a total. Long breaks fall at whatever interval you set, including never. The presets are the ones people actually use. Twenty five and five is Cirillo's, and the only one with a real claim to the name: he picked twenty five because that is what his kitchen timer wound to. Fifty and ten suits work that takes a while to get into, where a twenty five minute block ends about when you have started. Ninety and twenty comes from the ultradian rhythm literature, which is a weaker basis than it usually gets credit for, and is here because people ask for it. Any of them can be overridden field by field, so a preset is a starting point rather than a choice you are stuck with. What the schedule cannot include is interruptions, which are the entire thing the technique exists to handle. The finish time is the earliest one.

Questions

Why is the finish time earlier than I expected?

Because the break after the last round is not counted. A session that ends with five minutes of nothing has not ended, and a planner that includes that break reports a finish several minutes after the work actually stops. That is the difference between making a meeting and missing it.

How many rounds before a long break?

Four is the convention and it is a convention rather than a finding. The interval is a field here, including zero for never, because a two hour session does not need one and a full day of them needs more than one. Nothing about four is load bearing.

Will it actually take this long?

At least this long. Interruptions are the thing the technique is about, and no schedule can model them: a question from a colleague, a call, a build that fails. Treat the finish time as the earliest one rather than the expected one, and leave room after it.