Pomodoro Timer

What the Pomodoro Technique is

The Pomodoro Technique was devised by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, when as a university student he used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro is Italian for tomato — to commit to short stretches of undistracted study. The method is simple: choose one task, work on it for 25 minutes without switching to anything else, take a 5-minute break, and repeat. After four sessions, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.

Its appeal is that 25 minutes is short enough to start even when a task feels overwhelming, and the timer, not your willpower, decides when to stop. The breaks are part of the method rather than a reward: they are when you stand up, rest your eyes and let your attention reset before the next round.

How this timer runs the cycle

The sequence is focus, short break, focus, short break, with a long break in place of the short one after every fourth completed focus session. The dots show where you are in the current set, and the counter shows how many sessions you have finished. Only sessions that run their full length count: skip a focus session and the timer moves to a short break, but the session is not counted and the long break comes no closer.

With auto-start off — the default — the timer chimes at the end of each phase and waits for you to press Start, which is the classic method: you begin each session deliberately. Turn auto-start on and the next phase begins the moment the last one ends, for when you would rather not touch the screen at all.

Choosing your own lengths

Twenty-five and five is a starting point, not a rule. Many people settle on longer blocks once the habit is established — 50 minutes of work and 10 of rest is a common variation, and some prefer blocks of about 90 minutes — while shorter sessions help when a task is unpleasant or your attention keeps drifting. Change the focus, short-break and long-break lengths, and how many sessions come before a long break; the new values apply from the next phase, or straight away if the timer is not running.

Getting more from each session

Decide what a session is for before you press Start. When a distraction occurs to you mid-session — an email to send, something to look up — note it on paper and go back to the task; deal with it in the break or in a later session. If someone interrupts you, Cirillo's advice is to tell them you are in the middle of something, agree when you will get back to them, and then do so.

Count sessions rather than hours. Estimating a task in sessions — 'this report is about four pomodoros' — and checking the estimate afterwards is a quick way to get better at planning, and the counter here keeps the tally. Spend the breaks away from the screen if you can: checking messages tends to pull the next session's attention away before it has begun.

Chimes, background tabs and privacy

A two-note chime sounds at each switch, generated by your browser's own audio engine with nothing to download, and Test sound lets you check the volume. The time left and the current phase show in the tab title, so you can work in another tab and still see where you are. The countdown is calculated from the clock, so it stays accurate however much the browser throttles a background tab. Optional desktop notifications appear only after you allow them, and only when the tab is not in front.

On phones, browsers pause a page when the screen locks, so keep the page open with the screen on — the timer asks the browser to keep it awake — or the chime will be late. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded, and nothing is kept after you close the tab.