How ditching the Pomodoro Method saved my Sunday Planning as a Teacher

We’ve all been there: the Pomodoro Timer dings, just as you’ve finally got into the flow of things with marking your Year 9 assessments. You’ve been sat down for 25 minutes and the mark scheme is just about making sense, until you’re rudely awoken from deep work.

Well, if you’re still clinging to 25-minute bursts in the current world, it’s no wonder you’re getting distracted. You’re fragmenting your focus before it ever gets to mature.

That’s one of the failings of the Pomodoro Technique. It’s built on this philosophy of 25-minute bursts of deep work, with a 5-minute break at the time. Or, you could double-up to 50 minutes of work, with a 10 minute break to round off the hour. In theory, this is a great idea – and it’s served my writing and lesson planning many a time. It helps you to resist the urge to stay glued to your desk all day, forcing you to stop and take stock.

On the other hand, if it takes you 20 minutes to actually get started, you’ll have just 5 minutes of focused work before needing to take time off. What a way to interrupt the flow.

If you’ve tried as many time management techniques as I have, you’ll know that, sometimes, the Pomodoro Technique is just what you need. Sometimes, you need to switch it up. The latest craze is the 75/33 Rule, and it’s taken the world by storm. Here’s how it’s saved my Sunday planning as a teacher:

What is the 75/33 rule?

The 75/33 Rule came about during the pandemic, which saw huge numbers working from home in a bid to keep the world turning over. As lockdown restrictions lifted, return to office mandates were issued. Some employees fought back, citing enhanced productivity and better work-life balance as a result of working from home.

Now, we live in a time where hybrid working feels like the new norm. So many people will either work from home full-time, or hop into the office on a part-time basis – once a week or a couple of times a month. Due to the nature of my job, I cannot be one of those people.

(Though I did work from home for about 3 months in the pandemic, and loved every minute of it)

Not that I’m jealous of remote workers at all – but if I was, I’d be researching all the ways that they’ve been spending their 8-hour days differently. Working patterns have drastically changed in the past ten years. In 2014, employees were working for an average of 52 minutes at a time, before taking a 17-minute break. By 2021, this had shifted to working for a whopping 112 minutes, breaking for 26. Clearly, then, Covid caused people to work for longer.

Now? Hybrid workers average 75 minutes of deep work, with a 33-minute rest.

How does that apply to teachers, notorious for working exclusively in the office?

75/33 as a teacher

As a teacher, this new rule is huge.

Don’t get me wrong: I can’t apply the rule to my lessons. We teach in 50-minute stints, and that’s a rule of the school (yours might be different). But I wouldn’t count teaching as ‘deep work’. For me, deep work is a task with a clear objective that needs a good amount of quality time invested into it – whether that’s ten minutes or ten days’ worth of time. Teaching requires a lot of careful thought, but it’s distinctly different to what I’d label ‘deep work’.

So, in teaching, deep work might be lesson planning, or marking, or strategising for my department as the Head of History. Work that needs me to get really stuck in.

Working for 75 minutes at a time gives you just enough time to mark a set and a half of 30 books, or to make some serious headway on something that takes an awful lot of brain power. Then, a 30-minute break is more than enough time to make a coffee, pop to the bathroom, grab a snack and even catch up with a colleague if need’s be – right before starting Round Two.

And the data makes sense to me. You’re giving yourself time to ramp up in the climb towards deep work, and more time to mentally (or physically) recover. For me, that also means improved wellbeing, getting everything done much faster than before, and giving myself time for the hobbies that I love.

Are you going to try the 75/33 Rule? Let me know how it goes in the comments below, and how it fares against the Pomodoro Technique.

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