Be honest: how long did you mean to spend on your phone today? According to Ofcom's Online Nation report for 2025, UK adults now spend an average of four and a half hours a day online, outside work, and that figure rose by ten minutes in a single year. Do the maths and it adds up to well over two months of every year. Nobody sits down planning that. We open one app, lose track of time, and look up to find it is dark outside.

The strange thing is that we are terrible at predicting time even when we are trying. In 1979, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave the problem a name: the planning fallacy. We imagine the best-case version of any task and forget that emails, traffic and real life will get in the way. The classic example is the Sydney Opera House, promised for 1963 at a cost of $7 million. It finally opened in 1973, at $102 million. So the next time you say "I'll be ready in five minutes", remember that you are in very good company.

If we cannot trust our own estimates, perhaps we need a better trick, and the most famous one comes from a kitchen in Italy. In the late 1980s, a university student called Francesco Cirillo could not concentrate on his studies. He grabbed a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, tried different lengths, and settled on 25 minutes: work until it rings, then take a five-minute break. He named the method the Pomodoro Technique, after the Italian word for tomato, and it went on to become one of the best-known productivity systems in the world.

Notice that the trick has nothing to do with clever apps or perfect plans. It works because it makes time small, visible and hard to ignore. Perhaps that is the most modern time-management skill of all: assume your estimate is wrong, add a bit extra, and put the phone in another room. Twenty-five minutes, one task, and a tomato. What is your excuse?