Look at something real

My eyes were burning and my head was tight by mid-afternoon. I told my love about it. We talked about coming back to the body and feeling what I need. Breaks are essential for that. She’s a lot into somatic practices, and I love building my own tools. So I started building something that interrupts me and asks what I need.

what was actually draining me

Two or three agents running in parallel in my terminal, and me reaching for whichever one had a new status the moment there was a gap. I wrote about that reach in In a case. It kept getting worse. What I needed was a hard cut into that loop.

Most of my workday runs in the terminal, so that’s where the break had to happen: one screen in every terminal window at once. If you’ve heard of tmux, the engineering companion goes into the technical details.

pomodoro (and what writing surfaced)

I’d heard about pomodoro for a decade and never used it once. It’s the classic productivity technique. Twenty-five minutes of focus, five minutes of break, four cycles and then a longer break of fifteen to thirty. Cirillo invented it in the late 1980s with a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, and named the technique after the timer.

I picked pomodoro because I’d heard about it. I hadn’t done any research. Writing this post is what pushed me to pause and actually look. That’s how I found the ultradian research and the DeskTime rule, and noticed what agents changed about my focus.

A 2025 scoping review found that time-structured pomodoro sessions consistently improve focus and reduce mental fatigue compared to self-paced breaks. The mechanism that keeps showing up in the literature: externally cued breaks work better than self-cued ones. Left to cue myself, I get lost in time without realizing it. Some days I don’t turn the break screen on, and it’s almost scary how fast two hours go. What the research does not endorse is the 25-minute figure specifically, which was Cirillo’s own kitchen-timer experiment.

other frameworks in comparison

The DeskTime study from 2014 suggested 52 minutes of work to 17 of break, based on their most productive users. Kleitman’s ultradian rhythm research puts natural cognitive cycles closer to 90 minutes with a 20-minute trough. Flowtime abandons the fixed timer entirely and lets focus run until it wanes.

Any of these is just a timer, easy to update. The choice between them isn’t a technical one.

the ultradian question, and where that leaves me

The work I’m doing now feels much more intense than before. A lot more context switching and parallel tasks. With agents, my way of working keeps changing weekly or bi-weekly. The latest big shift was about a month ago, and I’m still improving my tmux setup almost every day.

The biology hasn’t changed. Kleitman’s pacemaker runs the same rhythm it always has. But the shape of the work happening inside a cycle has changed. I can still hold focus for a 90-minute window if I need to. My default with agents, though, has shifted to splitting attention across several at once. Short-term I get more done. By evening my eyes hurt and I have less left for anything after work than I used to.

So the break screen is really about sustainability. I want a healthy body and a functioning brain when I’m old. The way of working will have shifted wildly many times by then. I’m protecting my capacity to keep engaging with it.

Pomodoro is just where I’m starting. I’m happy to change the setup if something else is better or speaks to me more.

coming back to the body

In each break, the screen reminds me that I live in a body, outside the digital world, and helps me come back into it.

The screen shows one reminder per break and rotates through them. Small nudges to check on my current needs, which change over time. Some breaks the nudge is to drink, eat, or take a toilet break. Others are for movement: stretching, even a handstand. And some are for my eyes: one line on the screen says “look at something real”.

typing to close

I’m still extending the screen. The latest addition is a phrase I have to type to close it. Something like “just breathe” or “notice this”. I know they’ll wear thin with repetition. It’s small, but enough to break the reflex of closing it without reading, which is what I was doing with the first version.

so far

The screen has worked better than I expected. I rarely dismiss it. When I do, it’s usually because the break clashes with a lunch. Sometimes the thought comes: “I just want to finish this before my meeting in 3 minutes.” That thought is exactly why I built this. I’m at my most efficient when I’m fully immersed in work. And I have a hard time coming back from that. So when the screen interrupts, I follow with gratitude and do what the prompt asks.