It begins, as all modern lunacy does, with a fruit masquerading as a vegetable. The humble tomato—squishy, seedy, and previously only of use when hurled at unpopular public speakers—has somehow found itself rebranded as the saviour of productivity. This is the Pomodoro Technique. A system so absurdly simple, it could only have been cooked up by a man with a kitchen timer and too much time on his hands.

The principle is this: you set a timer (shaped like a tomato, naturally) for 25 minutes, during which you must focus on a single task with the intensity of a caffeine-addled monk. When the bell dings—ding!—you are allowed five minutes to do something relaxing, such as weep softly into your keyboard or attempt to remember what it is you were doing in the first place.

This process is repeated in cycles, called “pomodoros,” as if naming them after Italian salad ingredients somehow confers legitimacy. After four of these fruit-based bouts of fervour, you are granted a longer break, presumably to crawl out of the mental trench and question your life choices.

Let us examine the underlying assumption here: that the presence of a ticking tomato will somehow compel the average human to abandon procrastination and leap into focused action. This ignores several key facts about humanity, such as our tendency to spend the first 14 minutes of any 25-minute period adjusting our chair, fetching a biscuit, checking the news for signs of imminent doom, and wondering if we should take up pottery.

I tried it once. Dutifully, I wound the tomato. It clicked menacingly on the desk like a miniature time bomb. I stared at it. It stared back. I typed three words—“Bloody tomato thing”—and immediately felt the urge to urinate, make toast, and read something obscure about Roman plumbing.

By minute seventeen, I was standing in the garden, tomato timer ticking indoors, wondering if I’d ever been productive in my entire life or if I’d merely been busy. There’s a difference, you see. Productivity implies progress. Busyness, on the other hand, is just flailing in trousers.

And yet the cult of the Pomodoro persists. There are apps. Planners. Online forums where people boast of doing six pomodoros before breakfast, as if they’d conquered Everest in corduroy. It’s the modern equivalent of flagellation, except instead of a whip, you’ve got a tomato and a vague sense of inadequacy.

The truth is, no fruit can save you from your own brain. You can slap a timer on it, dress it in basil, and call it Roberto—but if you lack the will to focus, no Italian produce will rescue you. The tomato, poor thing, is innocent in all this. It never asked to be your overlord. It was quite content being sliced, salted, and slapped on toast.

So if you find yourself at war with your to-do list, may I suggest an alternative? Turn off your phone, make a cup of tea, and do the thing. No ticking. No tocking. No psychologically manipulative salad items. Just you, your task, and the comforting knowledge that somewhere, someone is still trying to explain to their mother why they need a £39.99 tomato app to answer their emails.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got twenty-five minutes left to look busy before the next imaginary vegetable tells me to have a break.