Pomodoro Timer

Focus, break, repeat

Press Start and work until it rings. Take the break it gives you. The timer keeps track of which session you are on and when the long break is due, so you do not have to.

All four intervals are adjustable, and the settings live in the page address — so a set you like can be bookmarked. Everything runs in your browser.

The technique in three lines

Francesco Cirillo worked it out as a student in the late 1980s, using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, which is the whole story behind the name.

1. Pick one task. Work on it for 25 minutes with no interruptions.
2. Stop when the timer rings. Take 5 minutes away from the desk.
3. After four of these, take a longer break — 15 to 30 minutes.

That is it. Everything else written about it is elaboration.

The long break comes after the fourth session

Worth stating plainly, because it is the one thing pomodoro timers get wrong.

Intervals alternate work and break, so the sequence runs:

Focus 1 · short · Focus 2 · short · Focus 3 · short · Focus 4 · LONG

The long break is the eighth interval, not the fourth. A timer that counts intervals rather than focus sessions gives you a long break twice as often as the method says — which sounds pleasant and quietly halves the thing you were measuring.

This tool shows what is coming next, several intervals ahead, so you can see the long break approaching rather than being surprised by it.

What a cycle actually costs

Here is the number that changes how people plan an afternoon, and that no pomodoro timer seems to show:

Four pomodoros is 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Not 100 minutes. The work is 1 hour 40, and then there are three 5-minute breaks and one 15-minute break sitting inside it. If you have two hours before a meeting, you have time for three sessions and their breaks, not four.

The header shows this figure and updates it when you change the intervals, because “I’ll do four pomodoros” is a plan people make without doing the arithmetic.

Why the breaks are not optional

The most common way to misuse this technique is to skip the breaks when the work is going well. That inverts the point.

The breaks are what make the next session possible. Sustained attention degrades — this is well established, whatever you think of the specific claims about attention spans — and a short, complete disengagement recovers more of it than pushing through. Twenty-five minutes is short enough that you can genuinely give it everything, precisely because a break is coming.

The other function of the break is that it is away from the desk. Switching to email for five minutes is not a break; it is a different task. Stand up, look at something further than an arm’s length away, get water.

Adjust the intervals

25/5/15 is the classic set. It is a starting point, not a rule, and the tool lets you change all four values because the right interval genuinely differs by person and by task.

50/10 suits work with a long warm-up — writing, complex code, anything where twenty-five minutes is mostly reloading context.

15/5 suits a task you are avoiding. The whole trick of a short block is that starting is cheap; fifteen minutes of something unpleasant is a bargain you will actually take.

A shorter long break, more often works if four sessions is more than you can hold. Set Long break every to 2 or 3.

A method nobody can adapt is a method nobody keeps.

Rolling straight into the next interval

There is a setting for this, and it is off by default on purpose.

Automatic advance into a break is helpful — you stop working the moment it rings. Automatic advance into the next focus session is not, because it starts your work timer while you are still in the kitchen. The session then reads as fifteen minutes of focus when it was eight, and the record you were keeping stops being a record.

Turn it on if you want an uninterrupted flow and you trust yourself to come back. Leave it off if you want the number to mean something.

It keeps time when you look away

A focus timer is used almost entirely in a background tab, which is the one situation where most timers quietly fail.

Browsers throttle background pages to save battery — often to one update a minute, and on a sleeping phone to none. A timer that counts ticks stops counting, and twenty-five minutes comes back reading nine, with nothing on screen to suggest anything went wrong.

This one works out the time from the moment you pressed Start, so the reading is correct however long the tab was hidden. The alarm is queued on the audio hardware’s own clock, which browsers do not throttle — the same mechanism that lets music keep playing in a background tab.

Closing the tab does stop it. Nothing here runs on a server, so there is nothing left to keep counting.

What it does not do

No task list, no history, no account, no statistics. Those are a different product, and most of them require somewhere to store your data.

If you want to count sessions, the header shows which one you are on. If you want the sequence, the table shows what is next. For a single timed block with no cycle at all, the countdown timer is simpler; to measure how long something took rather than budget for it, use the stopwatch.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

Work in focused blocks of 25 minutes separated by 5-minute breaks, with a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes after every fourth block. Francesco Cirillo named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used as a student. The intervals are a starting point, not a rule.

When does the long break come?

After the fourth focus session — not the fourth interval. It is an easy off-by-one: intervals alternate work and break, so the long break is the eighth interval. Change how often it falls with the Long break every setting.

How long does a full cycle actually take?

On the classic settings, 2 hours 10 minutes — four 25-minute sessions is 1 hour 40 of work, plus three short breaks and one long one. The tool shows this figure, because "four pomodoros" sounds like 100 minutes and is not.

Does it keep time if I switch tabs?

Yes. Browsers throttle background timers hard, so this works the time out from when you pressed Start rather than by counting ticks, and queues the alarm on the audio hardware's clock, which is not throttled. Closing the tab stops it.

Should the timer roll straight into the next interval?

That is a setting, and it is off by default on purpose. Rolling automatically into a break is helpful; rolling automatically into the next focus session while you are still away from the desk quietly turns your break into work time, which is the one thing the technique exists to prevent.

Can I change the intervals?

All four: focus length, short break, long break and how often the long one falls. 25/5/15 is the classic set, but 50/10 suits deeper work and shorter blocks suit tasks you are avoiding. A method nobody can adapt is a method nobody keeps.

What if I get interrupted?

Cirillo's own rule is that an interrupted pomodoro does not count — you note the interruption and start the block again. In practice, pause it, deal with the thing, and resume. The tool does not judge either way.