Pomodoro Timer

A classic cycle started at 9:00: four 25-minute focus blocks, a 5-minute break after each of the first three, and a 15-minute long break at the end.

Focus 9:00–9:25, break 9:25–9:30, focus 9:30–9:55, break 9:55–10:00, focus 10:00–10:25, break 10:25–10:30, focus 10:30–10:55, long break 10:55–11:10. The cycle is 4 × 25 + 3 × 5 + 15 = 130 minutes, of which 100 minutes, 77%, is focus time.

The common mistake: skipping the breaks. Working straight through four blocks feels faster, but the breaks are what keep the later blocks productive; a long day of back-to-back pomodoros without them usually ends with fewer finished, not more. The strip makes the planned breaks visible so they are harder to ignore.

Francesco Cirillo came up with the technique in the late 1980s as a university student in Italy, struggling to concentrate on his studies. He challenged himself to work for just ten minutes by a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, and refined the idea into 25-minute blocks with short breaks. He taught it to teams for years before describing it in a paper and then in his book The Pomodoro Technique, published in 2006 and widely republished since.

The method’s rules are simple on purpose: one task per pomodoro, no interruptions during it, a break after every one, and a longer break after four. Winding up the timer was itself part of the ritual, a signal to yourself that the next 25 minutes belonged to the task.

This Pomodoro timer runs focus blocks and short and long breaks of any length and any number of rounds, shows the whole cycle with clock times, and counts today’s completed pomodoros and focus minutes on this device. It can roll on automatically, play an alarm made in the browser, send a notification, keep the screen on, and show the time left in the tab title, and its timing comes from the clock so it stays accurate in the background.

Keyboard: space starts and pauses, S skips, R resets. Everything runs in your browser.

Related tools: Countdown Timer, Stopwatch, and Hours Calculator.