At 8 p.m. sharp every Monday to Thursday, a few dozen students gather in the virtual Pomodoro Study Cafe hosted by USC Libraries. The staff greets familiar and unfamiliar faces alike as people trickle in, before kicking off the first 25-minute session. Everyone works in silence until the five-minute break is announced. As soon as the short break is over, students get back to work and the process is repeated until 11 p.m. People drift in and out as they please in the meantime, though $5 Starbucks gift cards are raffled off by the hour as a bonus incentive to stay and study.
“In this time of remote learning, I saw that students were posting online about feeling isolated, stressed, and unable to concentrate on their studies,” said the Head of Leavey Library Karen Howell. “The Pomodoro Study Cafe provides a light structure, accountability, and a space for students to support each other.”
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system where you work non-stop on a single task for 25 minutes, followed by five minutes of rest. It’s supposed to make work more manageable, boost concentration and prevent burnout. Pomodoro means tomato in Italian, named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer tool.
The library ran a pilot program of the group Pomodoro study sessions last November during the run-up to finals, and the wellness resource was a hit. Students asked for it to be extended into the next semester. Since the first seven weeks of the spring semester, over 1,600 students—evenly split between undergraduates and graduates — from 76 different majors have attended the sessions.
Computer science master’s student Aarju Goyal first learned about the Cafe and the Pomodoro Technique from a school newsletter. “I was surprised by how much I was able to focus and how much I was able to be mindful of the time that I was giving to my work,” Goyal said. She hasn’tmissed a single day since.
Goyal tried doing Pomodoro sessions on her own but had less success. “I feel like with this technique, it’s more effective if you do it with other people just because you’re more accountable for how much time you’re giving,” she said.
Most participants usually have their cameras off at the Cafe. Nonetheless, a sense of community runs strong. Howell notes that while at first the only thing students have in common is studying together, they soon bond by using the chat to congratulate winners, commiserate on exams, trade tips and so on.
“As they attend regularly, they start to recognize names or faces of other regular attendees,” Goyal said. “They develop a shared experience of making progress on whatever they’re working on.”
Some students have even hosted Pomodoro sessions open to the USC public outside of Cafe hours. “There’s more connection in the student ones because it’s a smaller one and we can talk,” she said. Goyal has been hosting sessions since last semester. These only have three to four participants on average, who chat and get to know each other during breaks.
“I actually met people that I wouldn’t have met in any other circumstances,” she said. “They’re in a completely different school and there would have been no other group between us we would’ve had in common.”
Separately, the Health Science Campus hosted monthly in-person Pomodoro sessions at their library before the pandemic as part of their wellness programming. And instead of a Starbucks raffle, HSC would give out free pizza.
“We definitely had a lot of the same students coming back,” said Karin Saric, the information services librarian at the Norris Medical Library. “We wanted to create a space where everybody was welcome, and we were really happy to see that we had a lot of diverse students coming.”
Eunice Ngai, a freshman at Cornell University, has known about the Pomodoro method since middle school. She would occasionally host virtual study sessions with her friends from other universities, though she isn’t sure she would join a Pomodoro Study Cafe even if her school hosted any.
“I think it makes a difference if you know the people beforehand,” Ngai said. “I would definitely prefer it if I knew the people there.”
Both Ngai and Goyal acknowledge that a downside of the method is that the short five minute breaks can be disruptive to one’s workflow.
“I think it’s more effective if you’re trying to be productive in general, not when you’re running after a timeline,” Goyal said. “Basically if it works for you, then you should adapt it.”
Students may register for the USC Libraries’ Pomodoro Study Cafe here