The library crowd has doubled its size during this week, and foreseeably next week also. Every chair is occupied by students who are flipping pages, writing down notes and occasionally scratching their heads, winding wisps of their hair on their fingers while reaching for giant cups of coffee with the other hand. Tension suffuses every corner. “Happy Mid-term week,” they greet each other with a wry smile.

When everybody has the same consciousness of devoting a ton of time preparing for mid-terms, productivity and efficiency become the key factors that distinguish straight-As from average students.

I, no doubt, have been among the library crowd since the beginning of this week. During the weekend I told a friend that I was going to hang around the library from morning to midnight. “You look like you are putting in a lot of effort,” she remarked, “but are they paying off?”

She asked the right question.

I used to take pride in the huge amount of hours I put into studying in college. I was almost sure that as long as I spend time in the library, I would get a good grade, as if the library somehow has a mysterious power that would automatically insert knowledge into my head. But then I remembered how I used to stare at one page of my readings for half an hour without remembering any of it. Sometimes studying got so frustrating that on-line shopping and casual checks on social media became very appealing.

Minutes felt like a millennium. By the end of the day, I was always exhausted and dazed and accomplished little.

My friend invited me to study with her. That was when, once again, I witnessed the magic of “Tomato Methodology”, when she took out her phone, brought up “Timing”, and showed me how she separated her study time into sections of 50 minutes and hence maximizing her productivity.

The “Tomato Methodology”, also called the “Pomodoro Technique” (pomodoro is Italian for tomatoes) because it was developed by an Italian college student called Francesco Cirillo, is a time management method that emerged in the late 1980s while Francesco used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to time sections of his study time in college.

This time-distributing strategy breaks your time down into small sections and allows you to take a short break between each two time sections. “A pomodoro is the interval of time spent working. A short (3–5 minutes) rest separates consecutive pomodoros. Four pomodoros form a set. A longer (15–30 minute) rest is taken between sets,” says the rule of Pomodoro technique.

You decide ahead each task you want to complete within each of your “pomodoros”. During your “pomodoros”, you do nothing but finish the tasks. Then you take a short break, maybe go to the restroom or have some snacks, then you come back and complete your next section devotedly. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility, and that the sense of achievement for completing each task encourages you to keep going.

I have experienced it before. Back in China where adults have high expectations of their children, even elementary school goers, who are known for being hypoactive and impetuous, have to spend a certain amount of time concentrating on heavy school and extracurricular works.

I was among one of those elementary students. I remember vividly that I was given a kitchen timer in the shape of a crooked eggplant with nothing but a time axis around the middle. By twisting the eggplant I could get a 60-minute countdown and I was told to put nothing but my workbooks and the eggplant on the desk.

I was then among the top students in our school.

The eggplant timer, which was a cheesy Chinese-made product, was broken as I entered puberty. Parties, video games, rock bands and teenage love came up and I never found myself willing to buy another timer anymore. Years past and “being devoted to my studies” faded too far away from my mind.

Until now. Being in college, preparing for mid-terms, timing myself with my phone trying to maximize productivity, I feel like this is a throwback to when I was a simple-minded child who wished for nothing but to impress my fellow classmates and my parents with my perfect grades.

Except that now I am wishing to impress myself.