Focus cycles · advances by itself
Pomodoro Timer
Twenty-five minutes of work, five minutes off, and a longer break after every fourth round. The timer moves through the cycle on its own, so you never have to decide what comes next.
Focus
Space start or pause · S skip · R reset
Interval lengths (minutes)
Options
Today
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Sessions
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Focus minutes
Counted on this device and reset at midnight.
How it works
The Cycle, in Four Steps
Pick One Thing
Decide what the block is for before you start it. A pomodoro spent working out what to work on is a pomodoro wasted, and it is the single most common way the method fails.
Work Until the Timer Ends
No email, no messages, no quick look at anything. If something occurs to you mid-block, write it down and deal with it in the break rather than following it.
Take the Break Properly
Stand up and look at something more than a few metres away. A break spent on your phone at the same desk is not a break — the eyes and the attention both need the change.
After Four Rounds, Stop Longer
The long break exists because concentration genuinely degrades over a couple of hours. Fifteen to thirty minutes away from the desk restores considerably more than pushing on does.
Choosing a length
Which Cycle Suits Which Work
| Cycle | Suits | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 25 / 5 / 15 | Admin, email, revision, chores | The original. Short enough that starting is easy, which is the main obstacle with dull work. |
| 50 / 10 / 30 | Writing, coding, analysis | Long enough to get past the warm-up, with a break substantial enough to actually rest. |
| 90 / 20 / 30 | Deep work, research, design | Roughly one natural cycle of alertness. Best when interruptions are genuinely under your control. |
| 15 / 3 / 10 | Low energy, anxiety, hard starts | When twenty-five feels like too much to commit to. Fifteen minutes is almost always survivable. |
If none of these fit, type your own numbers. The value is in having a fixed block at all, not in any particular length.
Honestly
When Pomodoro Is the Wrong Tool
Work with a Long Warm-Up
Some work takes twenty minutes just to load the problem back into your head. Interrupting that at twenty-five costs you the reload every single time. Either lengthen the block substantially or use the hours timer and work in one stretch.
Genuine Flow
If the work is going unusually well, stopping because a timer said so is a bad trade. The orthodox method says stop anyway. The reasonable position is that flow is rare enough to be worth protecting when it arrives.
Meetings and Reactive Work
A day of scheduled calls and incoming requests has no space for uninterrupted blocks. Trying to force them produces a string of failed pomodoros and a sense of having failed, which is worse than not using the method at all.
As a Substitute for Deciding
A timer is very good at making you work and completely useless at choosing what to work on. If the real problem is an unclear priority, no interval length fixes it.
Answers
Pomodoro Questions
Where the method came from, whether it works, and when to ignore it.
What is the Pomodoro Technique?
Work for twenty-five minutes, break for five, and after four of those cycles take a longer break of fifteen to thirty minutes. Francesco Cirillo devised it as a student in the late 1980s, timing himself with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The whole method is that one rule plus the discipline of not breaking a cycle once it has started.
Why twenty-five minutes specifically?
There is nothing magic about the number. It is short enough that starting feels easy and long enough to get somewhere, which is the balance the method is aiming at. Cirillo has said he simply tried several lengths and settled on what worked. If twenty-five is wrong for your work, change it — the interval lengths here are all adjustable.
Does the technique actually work?
It works well for a specific problem: tasks that are easy to put off and hard to start. The fixed short block lowers the barrier to beginning, and the timer removes the decision about when to stop. It works considerably less well for work with a long warm-up, where being interrupted at twenty-five minutes costs more than the break returns.
What am I supposed to do if I get interrupted?
Cirillo's rule is strict: an interrupted pomodoro does not count and is started again from the beginning. The point is not punishment but measurement — if you cannot complete a block without interruption, that is information about your environment rather than about your concentration.
Should I really stop when the timer goes, even mid-flow?
This is the most argued-about part of the method. The orthodox answer is yes, because stopping while you still know what comes next makes restarting easy. The pragmatic answer is that genuine flow states are rare and valuable, and interrupting one to take a scheduled five minutes is often a poor trade. Try it both ways and keep what leaves you with more finished work.
Does the counter reset each day?
The session count is kept in your browser and resets when the date changes, so it shows what you have completed today rather than an all-time total. Clearing site data resets it immediately.
Will the timer keep running if I switch tabs?
On a computer, yes. The countdown is anchored to a finishing timestamp rather than counted tick by tick, so throttling in a background tab does not lose you any time. Phones suspend hidden tabs aggressively, so keep the screen on if you are running this on mobile.