How to use the Pomodoro Technique for reading

The Pomodoro Technique's rules, from Cirillo's own paper

Francesco Cirillo came up with the Pomodoro Technique as a university student in the late 1980s, when he made a bet with himself: "Can you study – really study – for 10 minutes?" He timed himself with a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, pomodoro in Italian, and the technique grew from there. His 2006 paper sets out the rules:

1. A Pomodoro is 25 minutes of work. "The traditional Pomodoro is 30 minutes long: 25 minutes of work plus a 5-minute break."
2. When it rings, stop and take a 3 to 5 minute break, even if you're mid-paragraph. Cirillo is explicit that you're "not allowed to keep on working 'just for a few more minutes'".
3. After every four Pomodoros, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.
4. A Pomodoro is indivisible. There are no half Pomodoros. If one is "definitively interrupted", it's void and you start a new one.
5. If you finish early, keep going until it rings, using the time to review what you've done.

For reading, a Pomodoro means 25 minutes on one book with nothing else open, then a short break away from it.

Why is a Pomodoro 25 minutes?

Francesco Cirillo, who created the Pomodoro Technique, chose 25 minutes because it "seems short enough to make it possible to resist being distracted by various kinds of interruptions." The length isn't fixed. In his 2006 paper he describes the ideal Pomodoro as 20 to 35 minutes long, and 40 minutes at most. Much shorter intervals, he writes, "don't allow us to achieve appreciable results".

For reading, that range is a sensible place to start. Twenty-five minutes is long enough to get into a chapter and short enough to begin when you don't feel like it.

How many pages can you read in one Pomodoro?

At the average adult reading speed, one 25-minute Pomodoro covers about 24 pages of a novel or 22 pages of non-fiction, at 275 words a page. At the slow and fast ends of the normal adult range:

The speeds are from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Two Pomodoros a day at the average speed for fiction is about 47 pages, which finishes a 300-page novel in about a week. The reading goal calculator turns any yearly goal into Pomodoros a day.

Does the Pomodoro Technique work for reading?

For study reading, there's some evidence that it helps with how the session feels, if not with how much gets done. In a 2023 study in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, Biwer and colleagues had 87 university students study for a day with either fixed breaks (6 minutes after every 24, the Pomodoro-like condition, or 3 after every 12) or breaks they chose themselves.

Students who chose their own breaks studied in longer stretches, and reported more fatigue and distraction and less concentration and motivation. The groups finished the same amount of work and put in the same mental effort. The authors concluded that fixed breaks had "mood benefits" and "appeared to have efficiency benefits".

That was one day of studying, not reading novels, so it doesn't settle whether timed breaks help with a book you're enjoying. We haven't found a study of the Pomodoro Technique and reading for pleasure.

Pomodoros for studying vs. for reading a novel

For a textbook or anything you need to remember, the Pomodoro Technique's rules fit well. His paper suggests using the first three to five minutes of each Pomodoro to repeat what you've learned so far, and the last three to five to review what you've just done. For study reading, that's a recap at the start and a summary at the end, built into the timer.

For a novel, the rules fit less well. The point of a break is to stop, and stopping in the middle of a gripping chapter works against the reason you're reading. Two ways round it:

• Use a Pomodoro to start, not to stop. Commit to one 25-minute session. If the timer rings and you want to keep going, keep going. It isn't Cirillo's rule, but it is how the technique began: a short, timed commitment to get past not starting.
• Stop at the break, not at the bell. When the timer rings, finish the page or the scene, then take the break.

What should you do on a Pomodoro break?

Get up and do something that doesn't take thought. Francesco Cirillo's 2006 paper on the technique suggests standing, walking around, having a drink of water or stretching, and warns that "it's not a good idea to engage in activities that call for any significant mental effort." For a reader, that rules out the phone: a feed is exactly the kind of switch in attention the break is supposed to avoid.

Should you pause a Pomodoro?

By Francesco Cirillo's rules, you shouldn't pause a Pomodoro: an interrupted one is void, and you start a new one. That makes sense for work, where the rule protects your attention from other people.

At home, reading is interrupted all the time, by a doorbell, a child or a stop on the train, and voiding the session every time turns a reading habit into a record of failures. That's the trade-off Chaptify's timer makes differently: you can pause a session when life interrupts and come back to the same one, and every page you read still counts toward your day.

What a week of timed reading did for me

By Ellis Newton, co-founder of Chaptify

After a week of using the Chaptify timer, I noticed that reading started to feel a lot more natural. Before, I would tell myself I was going to read and then end up putting it off. Having the timer made me actually sit down and start. Once I was a few minutes in, it was much easier to keep going.

The biggest difference was probably how much more aware I became of my progress. Seeing how much time I had actually spent reading made it feel like something I was actively working toward instead of just another thing on my to-do list. After a week, I wasn't necessarily reading for hours every day, but I was reading consistently, and that was the part that mattered.

Pomodoro® is a registered trademark of Francesco Cirillo. Chaptify is not affiliated with him.

Sources

1. Francesco Cirillo (2006). The Pomodoro Technique (paper, version of 19 October 2006). Checked 23 September 2026.
2. Francesco Cirillo, Currency (2018). The Pomodoro Technique. Checked 22 September 2026.
3. Biwer, Wiradhany, Oude Egbrink and de Bruin, British Journal of Educational Psychology 93 (2023). Understanding effort regulation: Comparing 'Pomodoro' breaks and self-regulated breaks. Checked 23 September 2026.
4. Marc Brysbaert, Journal of Memory and Language 109 (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Checked 22 September 2026.