Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

Succession and Duration

Think about two different aspects of time:

• Time as duration: “I’ve been shopping for two hours, and I’m still not done” or “Oh, I need to catch a bus in 10 minutes” or “How long will it take you to complete this activity?” This is time as a distance between two points—the start and end points.

• Time as succession: Hen 1 laid egg 2. Egg 2 was hatched, and hen 3 was born. Hen 3 laid egg 4, and so on. These are nonoverlapping events. We don’t know when they happened, but we know the sequence.

Thinking, planning, and calculating future time as a duration is very unpredictable—at least when it comes to doing things that we haven’t ...