Pomodoro Timer
Focus for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, then get a 15-minute long break after every fourth focus session.
Customize intervals
Pomodoro Timer
Pomodoro Timer runs 25-minute focus sessions with short breaks between them and a longer break after four, with configurable intervals.
How to use it
- Start a 25-minute focus session.
- Take the 5-minute break when it ends.
- After four sessions, take the longer break.
- Adjust the intervals if the defaults do not suit your work.
Where the technique came from and what it is actually for
Francesco Cirillo developed the method as a university student in the late 1980s, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used. The intervals were chosen because they were long enough to make progress and short enough that starting felt easy.
The breaks are not a reward, they are the mechanism. Committing to stop after 25 minutes lowers the cost of starting, which is where most procrastination actually lives. The technique targets the difficulty of beginning, not the difficulty of concentrating.
When it helps
- Getting started on work you have been avoiding.
- Structuring a long stretch so it does not become one shapeless block.
- Building an estimate of how many focused sessions a task really takes.
- Making sure breaks actually happen.
Common mistakes
- Working through the break. Skipping it removes the recovery that makes the next session work.
- Treating 25 minutes as sacred. Some work needs longer runs, and the interval is a starting point rather than a rule.
- Counting completed pomodoros as productivity. Sessions are units of time, not of progress.
