TimerWorks

Pomodoro, without the product

Four focus blocks, three short breaks, one long one. It runs itself, and there is nothing to sign up for.

Focus 1
00:00

The technique, briefly and honestly

Twenty-five minutes of work on one thing, five minutes off, four times, then a longer break. That is the whole method. It is often presented as a productivity system; it is really a commitment device. An open-ended intention to "work on the report this afternoon" is easy to defer. Twenty-five minutes starting now is not, because the cost of starting is bounded and visible.

The break matters as much as the block, and it is the part people skip. It exists so the next block is possible, not as a reward for the last one. Skipping breaks to chain blocks together produces the same fatigue as working straight through, which is what the technique was designed to avoid.

Why 25 is not sacred

Cirillo picked twenty-five minutes because it was the setting on his kitchen timer and it worked for him. For work with a long warm-up — writing, debugging, design — twenty-five minutes can end just as you get somewhere, and fifty or ninety is a better unit. The intervals are editable here for that reason. What matters is that the block has a defined end and the break actually happens.

Tracking the hours you are focusing for billing rather than for discipline? The hours calculator adds up sessions, breaks and billable totals for the day.

Other timers

Countdown timerAny duration, bookmarkableInterval / HIITShort work and rest rounds for trainingStopwatchCount up with laps

Questions

What is the pomodoro technique?
Twenty-five minutes of single-task work, then a five-minute break, repeated; after four rounds you take a longer break of fifteen to thirty minutes. It was devised by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s and named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. The mechanism is not magic — it works because a fixed short commitment is easier to start than an open-ended one, and because the break is compulsory rather than earned.
Why no accounts or streaks?
Because the gamification is a different product from the timer. Streaks create an incentive to protect the streak rather than to do the work, and a broken streak is a reason to stop entirely. This page keeps time and gets out of the way. If you want tracking, use a tracker deliberately rather than having one attached to your clock.
Can I change the intervals?
Yes, all three. Twenty-five and five are the canonical numbers, not sacred ones — plenty of people work better on fifty and ten, and deep technical work often does. The sequence still runs four work rounds before the long break.
Does it run the rounds automatically?
Yes. When a focus block ends the break starts on its own, and when the break ends the next block begins, with the alarm marking each transition. That is the point of a pomodoro timer: you should not have to touch it once you have started, because touching it means leaving the work.