Working with a pomodoro...

I was recently at the fifth Italian Agile Day, where there was an interesting discussion about the 'rigid' use of agile techniques, in particular about the Pomodoro technique. I knew this practice but never tried it seriously, so in the following week started to use it with my team (along with other techniques we already used, as pair programming...). I will not explain the pomodoro (by the way...'pomodoro' means 'tomato' in Italian...), as there are a lot of good resources out there in the Web, but want to express some random tougths about it:

- It really helps you to focus on your work and to decrease your distraction

- The standard time of 25 minutes for a pomodoro is not always optimal...I think this technique will be more effective not using always the same pomodoro time ( just a 5 minutes variation can do the work...). Obviously you change the pomodoro time before starting it, not during it. The gratest drawback of not having a constant pomodoro time is that you loose some precision in the extimation phase, as old pomodoro times can vary, but you gain in using more effectively your time

- It's not a capital sin if you go on working after the pomodoro rang, if just for a few minutes (3 - 5 min). In my experience sometimes the last minutes of a pomodoro can be the most productive, and there is no evidence of a bigger number of mistakes as someone (the agile radicals...) say. By the way, my pomodoro rang as I was starting writing this third point...

Maybe after some more use I will become more radical, but I always like flexibility, and don't think the same exact way is good 'as is' for everybody...
(total writing time: 1 pomodoro + 4 min...I'm slow when writing in English...)