Pomodoro timer

The Pomodoro Technique is a simple pattern: work for a fixed stretch of focused time, then take a short break. After a few of those cycles, take a longer one. That's the entire method. It was named in the 1980s after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro is Italian for tomato — and the timer is doing most of the actual work. It turns "keep going until I feel like stopping" into "keep going until the timer says stop," which is a far easier promise to keep.

It works because it removes two decisions you'd otherwise make constantly while working: when to start, and when it's acceptable to stop. Both get answered in advance. You don't negotiate with yourself moment to moment about whether you're still concentrating — you watch the number, and when it hits zero, you're done for now, guaranteed. That guarantee is what makes long, uninterrupted focus feel achievable instead of open-ended.

How the cycle fits together

Four phases repeat: focus, short break, focus, short break, focus, short break, focus, then a longer break, and the whole thing starts over. The small dots above the clock track your place in that cycle — one fills in for each focus session you complete, and they all fill during the long break. How many focus sessions happen before that long break is itself a number you set, not a fixed rule.

Why 25 minutes is arbitrary

Twenty-five minutes is not a scientifically tuned number. It's what one person, the technique's inventor, happened to have his kitchen timer set to as a university student. Nothing in the research says 25 minutes is the correct focus span for a human brain, and there is no reason your work should fit that number better than any other.

Change it. If 25 minutes cuts you off right as you're getting into something, try 50. If your attention genuinely wears out well before 25 minutes is up, try 15 or even less. The technique's value is the rhythm — fixed work, then a real break — not the specific number of minutes attached to it. That's why every duration on this page is a plain number you type, not a dropdown of choices someone else picked for you. The three presets are a starting point, not a limit.

Why the countdown stays exact in a background tab

Most timers built the obvious way — subtract one second on every tick — drift the moment a tab loses focus. Browsers throttle background timers hard, often to once a minute, specifically to save battery, so a tick-counting timer can lose nearly a minute of real time for every minute a tab sits in the background.

This timer never counts down. It stores the exact moment the current phase should end and, whenever it checks — on a fast poll while the tab is open, or once the moment you switch back to it — it simply compares that timestamp to the current time. Background the tab for twenty minutes, lock your phone, let your laptop sleep: the remaining time on return is exact, because it was never derived from counting in the first place. It's the difference between counting seconds in your head to guess the time and just looking at a clock.

Sound is generated, not recorded

The chime at the end of a phase is not an audio file. It's built in real time with the Web Audio API — two soft oscillator tones with a decay envelope, which is what makes it read as a bell rather than a beep. Nothing downloads, nothing needs to buffer, and it works offline. Adjust its volume or mute it in Settings.

Everything stays on your device

Your durations, your sound preferences, and your streak live only in this browser's local storage. Nothing you do here is sent anywhere — there's no account, no sign-in, and no server this page talks to beyond the one that served it to you. Clear your browser data and the history goes with it, which is also why there's a "Clear history" button of its own in Settings, so you don't have to dig through browser settings to reset it.