Episode 3 - Stop delegating! It might be burning you out

This week on Call Her Brilliant

• Stop delegating! It’s not helping you get more done. And it might be what’s burning you out. Unless you make this ONE brain shift. 

• Is Dolly Parton still working the 9-5 at 79 years old? No. She works 3-7am apparently. I’ll show you how to find your brain’s perfect schedule without the burnout. And no you don’t have to get up Dolly early

• What do I really think of Pomodoro timers. The timer your brain actually runs on. And a tiny habit to feel FOCUSED on demand.

TRANSCRIPT

This week on Call Her Brilliant, stop delegating. It might be what's burning you out, unless you make this one brain shift. Is Dolly Parton still working the nine to five?

No, she's 79 years old, and she works three till 7 a.m. in the morning, apparently. I'll show you how to find your brain's perfect schedule without the burnout.

And no, you do not need to get up that early. What do I really think of Pomodoro timers and the timer your brain actually runs on? Let's do this.

Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average. You got the gold stars and turned that grit into step-by-step success, but you're ready for more.

And only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck. You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition. That's more than mindset, more than strategy.

From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science. So you can create a life that's brilliant by design. In 2021, I made the smart decision to delegate more, and it almost destroyed my business and my sanity.

I actually started my private practice way back in 2018. Six months after my daughter was born, I was already back to work full time in my 9 to 5 on a hospital neuroscience team.

I knew it wasn't what I wanted long term anymore, because I wanted more freedom, especially over my time.

It was driving me bonkers, for instance, when I'd finish all my work by 3 45, but I'd have to sit and look busy until 4 15 when we were allowed to go home. Ridiculous, right? I leaned hard into the hustle, and that wasn't a bad thing.

I wanted to make sure I did things the right way, the smart way.

So I started my prior practice using my vacation days to see private clients, because I didn't want to quit my guaranteed stable 9 to 5, right, and cross my fingers that this business thing is going to work out for me. I'm a Monica, right?

Monica has planned vacations with itineraries, we're going just to Edmonton this weekend for my daughter's first cheerleading competition, and I already printed off a checklist of things we need to bring.

I am not a Phoebe who can just show up at an airport and buy a plane ticket anywhere. So I planned my business. I did it strategically, the smart thing.

I use my vacation days to see clients and probably some sick days as well. When I ran out of those, I went down to part time at the hospital. I knew this was a short term plan, but things got away from me pretty quickly.

I was killing it in my private clinic, seeing loads of new clients, but I would finish my work at the hospital. I'd come home, quickly have supper with my family.

I'd put my daughter, who was a toddler at the time, to bed, and I was already mentally going through my to do list for what I needed to get done that night while I'm trying to read a book to her and tuck her in, right? Not surprising.

One night, I put my daughter in the bath half dressed. Mom, I still have my socks on. She giggles.

She thought it was absolutely hilarious. She still loves to tell this story. What are we, like, six, seven years later?

Now, I wondered if I was about to break and if I could really hack it. But that hustle, it worked for me. It was a good thing at the time.

It built those first stages of my business. I was able to quit my hospital job in 2019. I was able to go full time into my private practice.

All of that was a good thing. The problem was, even though I looked successful, I still felt like I was doing something wrong. Because every single business podcast I listened to at the time said, hustle is bad.

You didn't start this business to work more than your nine to five.

There were books people would give me on the four hour work week, and self care became this thing that we were supposed to all do, and if we're not doing it right, and every day we're doing something wrong. Right?

Because I'm an overachiever, my brain said, okay, so I built the business. Now I need balance. I knew I couldn't hustle forever.

Logically, I knew that was not a good long term solution. I didn't want to be putting my kid in the bath half dressed or making a ton of mistakes because I was burning out. I knew I needed to do something different.

The smart solution, hire more help, right? Because that's what everyone was telling me that I should do, at least in the business space.

All the business coaches I worked with or everyone's podcasts that I listened to or books that I read said, you need to delegate, you need to hire more help. So I did. It was a disaster.

I did delegate. I actually did that part right, kind of. More on that in a sec.

I hired another clinical assistant. I already had one clinic assistant working with me in my private practice. I hired a second one.

And then what I did was I doubled the number of clients I was seeing in a week so I could keep them both busy.

I hired a podcast virtual assistant, a social media virtual assistant so that I could delegate some of that work so they could help me edit my podcast or create social media posts.

And then what I did is I expanded my podcast into video format so I could post it on YouTube too. And the work that I was doing every week for my podcast at the time tripled. I was seeing more clients.

I was checking more boxes every day. I was even making more money, but the boxes were never ending. I'd free up a couple hours a week delegating on a project, and I would immediately fill it with other stuff.

And then I locked myself in a stairwell twice in the same week. What happened was I was leaving my clinic one night.

I was thinking about whether I should pick up groceries before or after I pick up my daughter from daycare, what we were gonna have for supper, a project that I was working on, and client calls that I needed to return the next day.

And I left my keys sitting on my filing cabinet. Not the end of the world necessarily, but like I said, this happened twice in the same week. The second time was the worst.

I actually had to call a colleague to come rescue me because I went down the stairwell to go outside to my car in the back of the building and it was pouring rain outside. I couldn't get back upstairs without my keys.

And the only other way to get back in was to go out and walk all the way around the building in the pouring rain to let myself back in. I was doing a ton of mental multitasking at the time. I had delegated.

I had taken on some new habits, like delegating and asking for support. But because the way my brain was wired, I wasn't actually any less busy because time isn't just a habit. It's also in your cells and in your wiring.

If time was really just a habit, if time was finite even, if we truly all had the same 24 hours in a day, delegating would work, right? I hired support. I gave them more tasks.

I would have freed up time. I'd be less stressed. But it's not that simple because time isn't just a habit.

Which brings us to neuroscience for 90s kids. Neuroscience for 90s kids. Today's lesson, time isn't finite.

It's neurological. It's in your wiring. Here's what I mean.

Not all time is created equal. And we know this instinctively, right? But we get in our heads that we all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé.

Put aside for a second that Beyoncé is a multi-millionaire, and she can pay for support that most of us can't to make her hours worth more. There's also a difference in your brain when it comes to how much your time is actually worth.

Here's an example. I spent an hour this weekend learning how to put eyeliner on my eight-year-old. It was actually a lot more fun than I expected.

My daughter Allison is on the competitive cheerleading team this year. I mentioned we got to go up to Edmonton this weekend for her first competition.

Not only does being on the elite team cost more and require an extra practice every week, we got very detailed makeup guidelines that everyone has to do, including a smoky silver eye with eyeliner and a wing and a bold red lip.

I don't even do that on myself. The last time I put on eyeliner on myself was probably for a Halloween costume years ago, right? Doing makeup is not a core strength that I have.

I actually went to Sephora a couple weeks ago when we first got these makeup instructions and paid for them to do her makeup once so I could watch and video.

And thankfully, the very clever ladies at Sephora gave me some great tips on actually how to do this. But I was still nervous.

So I suggested to one of the moms on the team, the mom of Alison's best friend on the team, that maybe we should get together and practice.

Not only would it be good for us, the girls could hang out and maybe they'd be more cooperative if they were doing makeup together and they could sit and chat rather than just me trying to figure it out on my own, right?

So Saturday morning, 9.35, I roll up to her house with a box of Timbits for the girls and vanilla lattes for the moms. It took us an hour to do their hair and makeup. And no, it's not Sephora quality, but it's passable.

Here's the interesting part. That hour flew by. Like I actually said, oh my gosh, that took a lot longer than I thought it was going to.

I thought we were really sailing through it. So yes, I probably also need more practice. But the important point here is that we were in a kind of flow.

We were chatting about life, the girls were chit-chatting too, about whatever they were talking about with the cats that were running around. My friend has cats. They were comparing eyeshadows and sparkliness.

It was really fun. That time flew by. That felt a lot different than the hour I spent doing the first edit on this podcast.

I kept losing focus and getting distracted scrolling TikTok while I listened. Yes, now I'm on TikTok. Please come find me there.

I just joined last week. I don't know what I'm doing. I feel like I'm a million years old, but it's kind of fun.

So come find me on there. Anyways, side quest. I had to keep rewinding and listening again to make sure I didn't need to edit anything because I kept missing parts while I was listening to my own podcast.

I was fidgeting in my seat and going, oh my gosh, maybe I should just leave it. It's good enough. And that hour that I was editing felt like sandpaper in my eyes because time is relative.

And that's partly based on your past experiences and on what your brain anticipates. You don't really have an internal clock, at least not one as simple as a watch.

Your perception of time depends on this vast interconnected network of brain regions, and not just based on information that's coming in from your senses. Our perception of time is an interaction between your body and your emotions.

For instance, emotions like fear or joy tend to speed up time. That's why that hour flew by when I was doing makeup with my daughter, right? Boredom, not surprising, slows our perception of time.

No wonder it crawls when I'm doing anything tech related, right? Another factor that impacts how our brains perceive time, novelty. When things are new, our brain perceives time is actually slowing down, and routine speeds it up.

For instance, when you're having new experiences, you're trying new hobbies, starting a new business, learning how to tap dance, whatever it is.

Doing new things can create this perception that we actually have more time in our days, that our days slow down. And not in a bad way, like we're doing everything boring, in a good way, where we feel like we have more time to do more things.

But too much routine, repeating the same day over and over, that's when our days seem to rush past us. And all of a sudden, it's March, and you're wondering what you did with the entire first quarter of this year. I love me a good routine.

I like my lists. I like everything to be structured. But when it comes to time, having too much routine might actually steal your time away from your brain.

Want to slow time? Want to create more hours in your day? Do something fun, something that triggers joy, and something that's new, new and fun.

That's important. New and fun this week. This has been Neuroscience for 90s Kids.

Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Okay. Back to my hiring problem.

So I told you I hired more help. I did the smart thing. I did the right thing that I was supposed to do, and I ended up locking myself in a stairwell.

Twice. In the same week. Because we know the time isn't just a habit, right?

It's not even just in our cells. That's why our perception of time is relative. Because time is also in our wiring.

Here's some problems with that. Wiring problem number one. We worship at the shrine of the nine to five.

Nine to five does not work for brilliant women. And it wasn't even created by science. That nine to five schedule that we also religiously stick to, it was created by a bunch of rich white men trying not to have their workforce keep dying on them.

Right? It was a product of the Industrial Revolution, when factory workers were working 60 hours a week. Conditions were atrocious, and everyone was getting dysentery and dying.

Okay, maybe dysentery was more orgon trail, I know, but diseases were rampant because hygiene sucked and the workers were burning out and exhausted. So the nine to five came to be the 40 hour week, but there's no science to it.

Yes, there is some science that working too many hours makes you less productive. Like there's research that when you work more than 45 hours a week, you're less productive.

I read this one study where they compared people who worked 55 hours a week to 45 hours a week. The group that worked more, an extra 10 hours a week, did not get anything extra accomplished.

They were more likely to burn out, not surprising, more likely to report hating their jobs and being unhappy as well. So working extra does not guarantee checking off more. It works against our brain and our body's natural rhythms.

But there's also no real science that says 40 is this magic number. Why not 38 or 26? What makes 40 unique?

Nothing. Just a bunch of rich white dudes in their factories and the subsequent century of cultural repetition, right? Here's the real issue with that.

When we treat the nine to five as sacred, we fail to follow our brain's natural rhythms. I spent a week last year tracking biomarkers of my own peak performance. What I found?

Saturday mornings are actually an amazing time for me to work. They really fit with my natural rhythms and my life. I always liked getting up on Saturday and working from like 8 to 10, because no one interrupts me.

I'm not expected to respond to any emails. No one else is checking them. I have no pressure to check social media.

My kid is either still sleeping or she's watching TV. Husband's busy doing his thing. It's just me and the creative flow of whatever I'm working on.

But for a long time, I made myself wrong for doing that. I told myself that I shouldn't be working on Saturdays. Why can't I stop working at 2 on Wednesday and then work Saturday if that works for me and my brain?

Because my brain had learned this message that that wasn't the right way to do things.

That I was supposed to be working this 9 to 5 or 8 to 4, whatever it is, and supposed to be having boundaries and shutting down at the end of the day and not thinking about work and definitely not going back up to my computer at 8 o'clock at night to

put some work in on my podcast. And I absolutely should not be working Saturday mornings. Right? This is the message that we're getting.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Especially if you're in a role where you have some control over your days, like most of us do when we're in positions of leadership or running businesses. Right?

You don't actually have to follow the 9 to 5. It's not magic. You want to be creating days that are brilliant by design, that match your brain's strengths from your cells, to your habits, to your wiring.

Wiring problem number 2. Did we go too far in demonizing hustle? My body and my brain has always been used to go, go, go.

Right? Probably you too. So when I hired more, that same wiring made my brain default to, we need to go, go, go.

We need to keep the staff busy. We can't let them down. What if they're bored or hate their jobs?

And I hired them so I should put them to work because I'm supposed to be this efficient, amazing boss and be making more money and more success. Right? The high achievers I work with, we want to do things well, the right way.

So we can swing too far from one end of the spectrum to the other, from burnout to boredom. We demonize, hustle. I knew that working 24-7 wasn't sustainable, and you've probably seen some of those early warning signs of burnout too, right?

Brain fog, headaches, knots in your stomach, sleep's a mess, putting your kid in the bath half-dressed. Okay, maybe that one is just me, but you probably have your own examples, right?

When I tried to use habits as a solution, hiring more help, my wiring just carried over. Hustle burnout is not great, but we're also getting this message now that hustle is totally wrong.

So when I have a project I'm excited about, like this podcast, and I work Saturday afternoon to re-record this episode because I wasn't happy with my first cut, my brain says, oh, you're just being a perfectionist. That's wrong.

You should be able to just let go. And now we feel guilty that we're not relaxing enough, or that we suck at taking a break, which is not a great recipe for being able to access the parts of your brain that spark brilliance.

I felt that hustle was wrong, that I was wrong, that I was failing if I didn't figure out this four-hour work week thing. But maybe I don't want a four-hour work week. To be honest, I worked pretty dang hard to get here.

I spent 11 years in university. It's been what, now 12, 13 almost years since I graduated where I built my career on a hospital neuroscience team and started my prior practice, then built my consulting business, and now I'm getting into writing.

Maybe I don't want to retire at 55. I want to have it all. I want to enjoy my life now and build a career in business that I'm excited to wake up to.

I need a brain that can match that ambition. The solution? Rewiring how your brain sees time.

You know that each task on your to-do list isn't equally important, right? We all know this. Answering 57 emails is not the same or as productive as recording this podcast episode, at least not when it comes to my big goals or your big goals.

What you might not realize is that each task on your to-do list also activates your brain differently. And that is key to getting your time back. Because knowing how tasks pull at your neural capacity is how you align your days with your brilliance.

Here's an example. Recording this podcast takes a bunch of different skills. I need to come up with the idea.

I need to plan and draft what I want to talk about. I need to spend some time researching areas that I want to highlight for segments like smart women doing smart things or brain factor fluff.

I need to actually sit down and record this episode like I'm doing right now. Then I need to edit, I need to post it, I need to create social media and emails to go with it so you know that it actually happens.

Those tasks all require different brain regions, different skills. Podcast isn't unitary, not when it comes to your brain. For instance, when I am brainstorming ideas for podcast episodes, I'm really accessing my creative networks, right?

That default mode network we've talked about before on the show, trying to come up with something new and novel and outside the box.

When I'm drafting the script, I'm activating the language centers in my brain, my planning networks, even memory retrieval networks when I'm thinking about things like the stories I want to share with you.

When I sit down to record, I need to be in the right energy because it requires performance skills. My speech needs to be on. I need to be able to focus to be distraction proof.

Well, my cat who is definitely sitting behind me right now, messing something up on my daughter's desk, I need to be able to ignore her and probably ignore the sounds, if you can hear them as well, of her messing around, right?

We need a lot of skills. Editing requires a whole new set of skills. Detail, focus, but a different kind of focus in that flow state we need to write, yeah?

Different parts of the brain, which can burn out if you use them too much. If I try and record five episodes in one day, I'm gonna fail. Yes, batching is good, but only when we do it within our brain limits.

Even tasks that I love to do, like writing, I can't sit and do that all day either, because I'm gonna burn out those neural networks in my brain. They could only stay active and at their peak for so long.

Even simple tasks, those boring things, we have a limited capacity to be able to do at once. We need to work with our neural networks. That's why my smart habit of hiring was such a disaster.

I did something different after that. Instead of doing what I felt like I should do and what everyone else was doing, I created a precision system for myself that works with my brain.

Not complicated, but it made a huge difference for how much I get accomplished each week. What I did was change how I color code my calendar. Hear me out on this.

It is not a make work project. It actually aligns with your brain. Instead of color coding tasks randomly, I started color coding by how they match my brain networks.

For example, blue in my calendar is anything that activates my creative networks, my default mode network, those expansive skills. Writing drafts, coming up with ideas.

Green in my calendar, planning and organizing those executive control networks, really relying strongly on what's called your prefrontal cortex. Purple, editing, detail work. Yellow is still meetings, because I need them to stand out, right?

So I don't forget about them. I use light pink for my direct client work, because that requires one-on-one energy and brain power. Then, when I plan my schedule, I can look at it and viscerally in my body, know when my brain will need a reset.

I can do a quick look at my calendar, and I can feel if it's going to work with my brain. It's a gut check that's actually backed by science. I've been doing this for about six years now.

Before that, I was a strong paper calendar girl. We still have a paper calendar because we need a family calendar that we can all look at quickly.

But for my detail day-to-day stuff, I use my Google calendar, because it's really easy to do this color coding system.

And I would never go back, because it is so much easier for me, for example, I look at my calendar this morning, and it is this mess of random colors everywhere.

And I know that there is way too much purple on it today for editing and detail work after I'm done recording this task. And I know instinctively and intellectually that I need to move things around to work better this week.

It also means when something unexpected comes up, I know how to shift my calendar around, so I have not just the space but the mental capacity to do it. It doesn't have to be static either.

It's not something you set once and then it has to be that way forever.

I recently adjusted my color scheme over the holidays because I was adding this podcast back in and I needed it to reflect what that's going to be pulling from my brain every week. It's a system that grows with you and your business.

Give it a try this week. Before we move on, a quick comment about hormones. For women, in particular, hormonal cycles matter too.

Not just where you're going to have those neural peaks throughout the day, but hormonal fluctuations are going to make a difference because your brain's size, activity, and connectivity shift monthly, if not weekly.

These brain micro cycles are generally pretty subtle, but they are real.

For instance, when estradiol is high in the first half of your monthly cycle, brain cells visibly sprout new spines that reach out and connect with other cells, which means you're making sharper neural connections.

Structures in your brain called your amygdala and your hippocampus, which are involved in memory and emotion, they swell and they create stronger connections with your prefrontal cortex, which means you have better executive skills, more focused,

more on. The flip side, when estradiol recedes in the second part of your cycle, those connections between brain cells recede too, which we know is linked to things like low mood, irritability, headaches, and fatigue.

And it's not just our monthly cycle that matters. Perimenopause matters too. For instance, more than half of all perimenopausal women get less than seven hours sleep at night.

In context, before we start going through perimenopause, 70% of women are getting more sleep than that. If you got eight hours a night when you're 30, but you're getting six hours a night at 40, that matters for your rhythms and your brilliance.

So it's not just knowing what skills activate what parts of your brain, but also when your unique rhythms are going to be firing best for those skills. So take advantage of that natural brilliance.

It's why I work with my clients one-on-one to track some of those same biomarkers of peak brilliance and rhythms to create a system that's going to work with your brain and your business.

Which is a great segue to this week's segment, Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Today, we are talking about Dolly Parton.

Musical icon, business genius, not just a smart woman, a smart woman for decades. Her debut album, Hello I'm Dolly, was released in 1967, which started a career that has spanned 60 years, 50 studio albums.

She sold more than 100 million records worldwide. She's got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was ranked number 27 on Rolling Stone's 2023 list of the 200 greatest singers of all time.

And she doesn't just sing. She owns Dollywood, her theme park. She has a line of pet products, fragrances, wines, even baking mixes.

And she runs a charitable foundation. How does Dolly do it all? Two keys.

Key number one. She knows her zone of genius. I was reading an article where she was interviewed for the Financial Post, and in it, she's quoted as saying, I'm smart enough to know.

I don't know all the things I need to know about any of that other than my music. I'm more of the creative force and the one that has an overall sense of things. I try to find the best people and I try to trust them to do what they say they can do.

Then I have people looking out after all of them. Dolly knows what she's good at. Her zone of genius is music.

So she leans into that genius. And yes, she does hire people for everything else. But that brings us to key number two.

She's definitely not Auntie Hussle. I listened to an interview she did on the Work Life podcast with organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who I also love, by the way. I'm reading his book Hidden Potential right now.

Probably talk more about that in a future episode because I really love his research. But back to Dolly. She was on his podcast and Adam Grant asks her, How is your view of work changed since you first wrote 9 to 5?

And what is pouring yourself a cup of ambition like today? Dolly says, I've got so many irons in the fire, sometimes I'm burning my own butt.

I have to get up earlier, I have to work longer, and I have to have a bigger cup of ambition in the morning to get it all done. Apparently, she has a habit of doing her peak work from 3 till 7 a.m., yes, in the morning.

But she doesn't stay up all night, she sleeps. She knows when her brain's peak hours are, and she uses them. Sorry if you also heard weird noises.

There I had to kick a cat out of my office. I'm recording this at home, and it is always a challenge with cats. If you have cats, you know, because I want to close my office door so I don't get noises from the rest of the house.

But if I close the door, the cats scratch at it to get in and out, even though regularly they don't care what I'm doing all day and they do not want in and out of my office. Anyway, side quest there. Back to Dolly.

Key number three, to Dolly's brilliance. She's mastered strategic perfectionism. In that same interview with Adam Grant, she calls herself a professional perfectionist.

And she says, for example, she records a song, and then maybe there's a technical mistake, but it feels right, that emotion is there. She leaves it.

Rather than obsessing and mess up the vibe, she knows when she should obsess, when to be a perfectionist, and when to just leave it. And that's a skill I'm really leaning into right now. For a long time, my mantra was, done is better than perfect.

I think I first heard it from Marie Forleo, but I'm sure she wasn't the first to say it. But at a time, when I was doing all the things, and burning out, I really needed that mantra. Not anymore.

I'm at a stage in my business, and my ambition, where I don't want just good enough. I want the projects that I care about to be extraordinary. So I'm letting myself obsess on those details, like this podcast.

If you're listening to this right now, this is my third episode of this relaunched Call Her Brilliant podcast.

For two of those three episodes, the first one and this one, I wrote the podcast, I recorded the episode, I edited it, then I tossed it out and started again from scratch, because I wasn't happy.

And as annoying as it was to lose all that time, I'm okay with it, because I want this to be more than average.

I'm not obsessing about the real on Instagram with a weird typo, or the transition didn't work, or the email I forgot to respond to until the next day. No. I know what's worth being a professional perfectionist, and what's not.

Dolly knows too. Here's what we can take away from the incomparable Dolly Parton. Decide where you can obsess over detail, and where done is better than perfect.

The key is obsessing where it's your strength, finding your zone of genius, and going all in. We don't need to be anti-hustle. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to work hard.

The goal is to align your days with your brain so that hard work has more of a payoff. And that's why Dolly Parton is this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.

Before we wrap this episode, let's play a round of brain fact or fluff. Brain fact or brain fluff. Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is backed by science or just Instagram glitter.

Today, we're talking about Pomodoro timers. All the rage the last few years in the online productivity influencer community.

If you haven't heard of them, the basic idea is that you set a timer for 25 minutes, you focus, you get stuff done for that 25 minutes, then you take a 5 minute break and repeat.

The idea being that if you work in these focus blocks, you'll be more productive. And the concept has always felt a little bit off to me.

But as I'm getting older and hopefully wiser, I'm learning I should probably think again when it comes to some of my assumptions.

Side quest, Adam Grant, who we were talking about earlier when he interviewed Dolly Parton, has another book called Think Again, which I would highly recommend.

Anyway, I decided before I go rolling my eyes whenever I hear someone mention Pomodoro, I should dig into the research. Something I learned when I started this research, it all started with a tomato.

Developed in the late 1980s by university student Francesco Cirilio, I hope I said that kind of close to right. Anyways, university student, he was struggling to focus to study. The story goes, he had this kitchen timer that was shaped like a tomato.

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. Initially, he challenged himself to work just 10 minutes at a time. He'd set the timer, he'd work, it would go off, he'd take a break.

Then gradually, he increased how long he was focusing for. And he found it was really helpful to actually set this timer. It got him to work when he didn't want to.

He formalized this into a system for himself where he found that 25 minutes of work and a five minute rest break worked really well. After four of these sprints, he would take a longer 15 to 30 minute break.

And yes, there's probably some validity to that original use. If you are really procrastinating on something, your brain is gonna be stuck in resistance mode, coming up with all these reasons to not get started, or why it's better to do it tomorrow.

Getting yourself committed to starting for just five minutes has some validity, because what it does is it overcomes that initial massive resistance. Your brain doesn't want to write that whole report, but you can do anything for five minutes, right?

So your brain gets started, and often you end up working longer, working more than you anticipated, because that mental sludge has been moved out of the way. But does this type of timer actually help with productivity?

And the research is actually a bit conflicted. For instance, there was a study done in 2023 published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

They looked at Pomodoro style, systematic, oh my goodness, now I can't talk, systematic breaks or self-regulated breaks. They took 87 university students at a Dutch university. Half of them they assigned to take self-regulated breaks.

So they were studying, they could take a break whenever they decide it was best. The other half, they told them to either take a six-minute break every 24 minutes of studying or a three-minute break every 12 minutes of studying. Here's the results.

The group that set their own breaks, they had longer study sessions and longer breaks, but this was also associated with them reporting feeling more fatigue, more distracted, and lower motivation.

But there was no difference between the groups in terms of task completion. So having a planned break every 24 or 12 minutes made students feel better, but it didn't necessarily make them more productive.

And there was no difference between the 24-minute or the 12-minute group. 24 minutes or 25 isn't some magic number. But maybe planning breaks in advance can help with motivation and focus, at least when it comes to mood.

But there was a 2025 study published in Behavioral Sciences that found almost the opposite. It again looked at self-regulated versus Pomodoro breaks for university students. It had them do a two-hour study session.

One group again decided when they wanted to take their breaks and how long. The other group was a true Pomodoro group. They took a five-minute break every 25 minutes and got the opposite results.

This time, the group taking the Pomodoro breaks reported a faster increase in fatigue and lower motivation. And again, there was no difference in productivity.

So basically the opposite of the other study, where Pomodoro breaks made people more tired and there was no benefit for productivity. Here's the neuroscience. Humans have a natural focus rhythm.

How long we can sustain attention on one task? That cycle, it's about 60 to 90 minutes. That's why, if you remember back in university, most classes were 60 to 90 minutes, right?

Except for those three hour 7 a.m. labs, which were the worst, right? I'm not a dolly.

I don't like getting up early. 90 minute natural rhythm that we have for focus is similar to a sleep cycle, where our brain shifts between these periods of high alertness and physiological rest.

Peak performance happens when we align our work or our learning with these 90 minute blocks, so you can optimize productivity, creativity, and make less mistakes.

But if you push beyond that, it works against your brain's biology and results in memory errors, concentration problems, and burnout. Interesting note, it is harder to stay focused on something boring compared to something challenging.

We know this, right? It is way harder to stay focused bookkeeping than researching cool things like Pomodoro systems and if they really work.

Doing continuous boring tasks increases your brain's stress response compared to more complex or variable tasks because our brains are designed for novelty. So, is the Pomodoro method brain factor fiction?

Yes, we have focus limits, where our brain is going to be at its peak. Yes, taking breaks help, but 25 minutes, used mostly for Pomodoro, is made up. It's not a magic number.

What I would say, use those shorter intervals for boring stuff. The stuff that is going to be harder for your brain to maintain focus on.

But, if you want to do deep work, use your brain's 60 to 90 minute natural cycle, followed by a five to 10 minute break. Brain fat or brain fluff? Okay, that's it for today.

Thanks for joining me. I'm Dr. Nicole Byers, and this is Call Her Brilliant.