The Pomodoro Technique · Part 5
The 52/17 Rule and 90-Minute Cycles: Longer Pomodoros
The 52/17 rule and 90-minute cycles: where they come from, what holds up, who they suit, and how to set a longer rhythm when 25 minutes is too short.
52/17 comes from DeskTime watching its own users, and 90 minutes is the sleep cycle carried over to the working day; neither has become a proven law of productivity. Long rhythms suit work that takes a while to spin up — as long as the break grows along with the work.
If twenty-five minutes keeps cutting your thinking off mid-sentence, that’s not a weakness. Some work is fine in quarter-hour chunks; other work needs ten minutes just to spin up: open the code, remember where you were, rebuild the picture in your head. Longer rhythms exist for that kind of work — and they come wrapped in more myths than the classic pomodoro.
Where 52/17 comes from
The rule comes from DeskTime, an app that tracks which programs employees spend their time in. In 2014 the company took the top ten percent of its most “productive” users — those with the highest share of time in work apps and sites — and looked at how they split their day. On average: fifty-two minutes of work, then a seventeen-minute break.
It sounds like a recipe, but it’s an observation, not an experiment. Nobody assigned people to work 52/17 and compared them with anyone else. “Productive” here means time spent in apps tagged as work, not what the work produced. The data comes from one tracker’s users, and the findings were published on the company blog, not in a peer-reviewed journal. DeskTime has since rerun the numbers itself: in 2021 it got 112 minutes of work to 26 of rest (80 to 17 in February 2020, before the pandemic), and in 2025, 75 to 33. The figures drift with how people live, so there’s nothing magic about them.
The honest takeaway is more modest: people who get a lot done take real breaks — across DeskTime’s counts, anywhere from a sixth to nearly a third of their working time. That’s a useful idea, not a law.
Where 90 minutes comes from
Physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman, one of the discoverers of REM sleep, proposed in the early 1960s that the sleep cycle — deep and REM sleep alternating roughly every ninety minutes — doesn’t switch off in the morning. It supposedly carries on through the day as a “basic rest-activity cycle” (BRAC), showing up as waves of alertness and drowsiness.
For sleep, that’s established: a cycle of about ninety minutes is real. For waking hours, it’s contested. Some studies did find ninety-minute swings in sleepiness and attention during the day; Peretz Lavie pulled them together in a 1992 review. Others — such as a 1977 paper in Nature by Moses and colleagues — concluded that the REM cycle depends on sleep itself and doesn’t continue through the day.
More to the point, there don’t appear to be any studies showing that working in ninety-minute stretches gets more done than fifty- or twenty-five-minute ones. Carrying the sleep cycle over into the workday is a hypothesis. Ninety minutes is a handy upper limit, not a discovery in biology.
Who longer rhythms suit
Work with a long ramp-up: code, writing, analysis, design. If ten minutes go just to getting back into context, a longer pomodoro leaves more time for the work itself.
They don’t suit you if your day is chopped up by meetings, people interrupt you a lot, or you’re just starting out. A long pomodoro abandoned at minute thirty is worse than a short one finished. Early on, a shorter rhythm is the better bet — even Gentle Start at fifteen minutes.
Four rhythms side by side
| Rhythm | Focus | Break | Pomodoros in 4 hours | Actual work | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25/5 | 25 min | 5 min | 7 | 175 min | most tasks, beginners |
| 50/10 | 50 min | 10 min | 4 | 200 min | code, writing, design |
| 52/17 | 52 min | 17 min | 3 | 156 min | people who need longer rest |
| 90/20 | 90 min | 20 min | 2 | 180 min | rare meeting-free days |
This counts four straight hours, breaks included. For 25/5 the long break is fifteen minutes after four pomodoros; for 50/10, twenty after three; 52/17 and 90/20 have no long break. A longer pomodoro doesn’t necessarily mean more work: the gain is less about minutes and more about the task getting cut off mid-thought less often.
The main trap
A long pomodoro without a long break is just overwork. Fifty minutes of work and three minutes at the coffee machine isn’t a rhythm; it’s an ordinary workday with a timer. If you stretch the pomodoro, stretch the break too. In 52/17 the break is a third of the pomodoro, and if you take one thing from the rule, take that.
The second trap is “five more minutes and I’ll finish this.” It hits harder on long pomodoros: you’re deep in the task and the bell feels like an intrusion. That’s exactly why it’s your cue to stop. Write one line about where you left off — the thought will keep until after the break. If you overran, don’t beat yourself up: notice it and get up on time next round.
How to switch
- Start with 50/10 — the gentlest of the long rhythms.
- Check a full week: how many pomodoros fall apart, and how you feel by evening.
- Extend by ten minutes if the week went smoothly and the bell still catches you mid-stride. Stretch the break along with it.
- Step back if pomodoros start breaking more often. That’s not a setback; you’ve found your limit.
What about Flowtime?
Flowtime was described by Zoë Read-Bivens, and it’s a separate technique with its own rules. The timer counts up, you work until you tire or get distracted, note the time, and rest longer the longer you worked. The signal to stop is how you feel, not a bell. It suits people who find any bell irritating and who read their own fatigue well. Its weak spot is the same as with ninety minutes: it’s easy to “forget” to stop.
Don’t blend it with pomodoros. Inside a pomodoro, the rule from part one still holds: if the task is done before the bell, spend the remaining minutes on that same task. If you want to try Flowtime, give it a separate week and compare.
In the app
The built-in Deep Focus rhythm is 50/10/20, three pomodoros per cycle. For 52/17 or 90/20, open Settings → Timer and set the durations yourself: focus and breaks go from 1 to 180 minutes, and Long break after N sessions is there too. If you change a duration mid-session, the current one finishes at the old length and the new one applies from the next.
Weekly suggestions only move the pomodoro within 15–25 minutes, so they don’t touch long rhythms — here you keep an eye on breakdowns yourself. There’s no count-up timer, so the app can’t do Flowtime. Skip (⌘K) is for a pomodoro that fell apart: it won’t count, but nothing is lost.
A long pomodoro needs an honest break. How to spend those minutes so you actually rest is the next part: what to do on a Pomodoro break. And to fit long pomodoros into your working day, see time blocking and Pomodoro.