The pomodoro technique treats twenty-five minutes of focus plus a five-minute break as one countable unit. This timer runs that cycle for you and slots in a long break (15 minutes by default) after every fourth focus block. Finished blocks stack up as today's count, and the last seven days stay on screen as bars. Every interval is adjustable from 1 to 180 minutes, and the long-break cycle from 2 to 12. Time remaining is computed from an absolute end time, so hiding the tab or switching apps never makes the clock drift.
A block you skip does not count toward today's total. Sitting through it has to be the only way to raise that number, or the number stops meaning anything.
Changing settings never alters the interval currently running — a clock that grows or shrinks mid-interval leaves you unable to tell what just happened.
A screen wake lock is held while the timer runs. Browsers without support simply lose that feature; the timer itself is unaffected.
Settings and history live in this browser (localStorage) and are never sent to a server, so they do not follow you to another device.
Pick one task, set the timer to twenty-five minutes, work on nothing else until it rings, then rest for five. Repeat four times, take a break of 15 to 30 minutes, and start over. That is the whole method — no app is required, and Cirillo himself used a single kitchen timer.
The point is not measuring time but counting an unbroken twenty-five minutes as one unit. A pomodoro is indivisible: if you drift off to something else partway through, that pomodoro did not happen and the next one starts from zero. That rule is what makes a number like six today mean six blocks you actually sat through.
Which is why Skip on this page does not add to today's count. Sitting through the block has to be the only way to raise the number, otherwise there is no reason to look at it.
Skipping the five minutes to run two blocks together is the most common mistake. The technique is not aiming at long stretches of sitting; it is inserting recovery so the afternoon keeps the density of the morning. Remove the breaks and the first two or three hours are good while the rest collapses.
Take your eyes off a screen during the break. Reading another tab for five minutes is, as far as your attention is concerned, still working, and it only lengthens the run-up into the next block. Standing, water and a look out of the window recover you faster.
The long break runs 15 to 30 minutes. Decide what the next block will contain, but do not do the work itself — a long break filled with light tasks is not a break, it is just less focused work.
External interruptions — a colleague, a call — take four moves: say you are mid-block, agree when you will get back to them, write that time down, and then actually do it when the pomodoro ends. The last move is the one that matters; defer without following through and nobody will wait next time.
Internal interruptions — a task that suddenly occurs to you, something you want to look up — go on a list in one line and you carry on. Writing it takes three seconds; going to look it up takes ten minutes. Work through the list during a break or at the end of the day.
If something genuinely cannot wait, abandon the pomodoro rather than half-attending it. Clinging to a broken block costs you the time and adds a twenty-five minutes you cannot count. Dropping it and restarting is also the honest thing to record.
Lengthen the focus block for work with a long warm-up. Reading code or drafting a long document can take ten minutes just to load the state into your head, which spends nearly half of a twenty-five minute block on preparation. Fifty minutes of focus with a ten-minute break is the usual answer.
Shorten it for work you keep avoiding. When starting is the hard part, 15 and 3 works better, and the goal is not to fill fifteen minutes but to remove the barrier to beginning. Once you are in, lengthen the blocks again.
Match the long-break cycle to the day. On a day broken up by meetings, two or three blocks before the long break is more realistic than four; on a day alone with one project, four fits well. This page accepts anything from 2 to 12.
Have one test before you change anything: at the end of a block, are you reluctant to stop or relieved to? Reluctant means lengthen it. If the last five minutes were endurance, shorten it.
Even on an undisturbed day, twelve genuine focus blocks is about the ceiling. Twenty-five minutes times twelve is five hours, and adding the breaks and long breaks already passes seven. Hitting twelve inside an eight-hour day means there were no meetings and no conversations.
On an ordinary day with meetings, four or five is a good result. Knowing that number changes how you plan: instead of intending to finish everything, you start sizing work as a three-block job, and the blocks left in the day tell you what actually fits.
Estimating work in blocks is the quiet half of this method. Your first estimates will be wrong by a factor of two, but a week of counting gives you a feel for what a two-block task looks like. That is why this page keeps the last seven days on screen.
Remaining time is derived from an absolute end time rather than subtracting a second per tick. Browsers throttle timers in background tabs to roughly once a minute, and a per-tick countdown drifts by minutes — in a pomodoro that drift means sitting past the end without knowing, so the clock is anchored to real time from the start.
A screen wake lock is held while the timer runs and released when it stops. Browsers drop the lock when a tab is hidden, so it is re-acquired and the display repainted the instant you come back.
The chime is synthesised in the browser rather than loaded as an audio file. A file would wait on the network for its first play, and a timer sound only means something if it lands on time. The chime can be switched off in settings.
No notification permission is ever requested. The tab title carries the countdown and your current task instead — the same information, without a permission dialog.
Settings and the seven-day history stay in this browser. Nothing is sent to a server, so there is no account, no syncing between devices and no global leaderboard.
You focus on one thing for twenty-five minutes, then rest for five, and count that pair as one pomodoro. After four of them you take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes. Francesco Cirillo devised it in the late 1980s as a student, timing himself with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro is Italian for tomato.
It is short enough that starting feels easy and long enough to actually get into a task. Twenty-five is a starting point rather than a rule: work with a long warm-up such as writing or coding often suits 50 minutes better, while a task you keep avoiding is easier to begin at 15.
Yes. The timer stores an absolute end time and subtracts the current time from it, so the browser throttling background timers does not matter — the clock is correct the moment you return. The countdown also appears in the tab title, so you can watch it from another tab.
Yes. Focus, short break and long break each accept 1 to 180 minutes, and the number of focus blocks before a long break can be 2 to 12. Your values are saved in this browser for next time, and one button restores 25 · 5 · 15 · 4.
Only in this browser, via localStorage. It keeps the last seven days of counts and sends nothing to a server, which is why there is no account and no global leaderboard. Clearing browser data or opening the page elsewhere starts from empty.