Beat distraction with focused sprints and breaks. Customize the lengths, watch the ring, and get a gentle alert when it's time to switch.
🔒 The timer runs in your browser — settings are saved on your device only.
Short, focused sprints make big tasks feel approachable and keep you moving.
A sound and notification tell you exactly when to focus and when to rest.
Customize focus and break lengths — they're remembered for next time.
Francesco Cirillo developed the method as a university student in the late 1980s, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used. The structure is 25 minutes of single-task work, a 5-minute break, and a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes after four cycles.
Its value lies less in the specific durations than in three mechanisms. A fixed short interval makes starting easier, because committing to 25 minutes is far less daunting than committing to a task of unknown length. The timer creates a visible boundary that makes interruptions easier to defer. And the enforced break interrupts the tendency to work until depleted.
Cirillo's original method includes a step often dropped: recording interruptions as they occur rather than acting on them, which both defers them and reveals over time where attention is actually going.
There is nothing special about 25 minutes, and treating it as fixed is the most common way the technique fails. Work requiring deep concentration — writing, programming, analysis — frequently needs longer to reach a productive state, and 45 to 90 minutes suits it better. Being interrupted by a timer at the point of finally focusing is counterproductive.
Shorter intervals genuinely help in the opposite case. For work you are avoiding, or when concentration is difficult, 10 or 15 minutes lowers the barrier to starting, which is usually the actual obstacle.
Breaks should involve moving and looking at something other than a screen. Scrolling on a phone during a break provides little recovery from screen-based work, since it continues the same kind of attention. Standing, walking, or looking out of a window at distance also relieves the eye strain that comes from sustained near focus.
The technique suits work that can be decomposed into discrete chunks and where the challenge is starting or sustaining attention. It is genuinely helpful for procrastination, because it converts an unbounded task into a bounded one.
It suits some work poorly. Collaborative work, meetings, anything reactive, and creative work in flow all resist arbitrary interruption — and interrupting flow to take a scheduled break is the opposite of useful. Cirillo's own guidance is that a pomodoro cannot be interrupted, but nothing requires you to start one when the work does not fit.
The most valuable side effect is estimation. Recording how many intervals a task actually took, against how many you expected, calibrates planning quickly — and most people discover they substantially underestimate. Treat the method as one option rather than a system to conform to; a technique that adds friction to work that was going well is not helping.
Work in focused 25-minute sprints separated by short 5-minute breaks, with a longer break after four sprints. It boosts focus and reduces burnout.
Yes — set your own focus, short-break and long-break durations. They're saved on your device.
Yes — a clear alarm chime plays (repeated so you hear it even from another room), and if you allow it a browser notification appears. Pick your alarm sound, set the volume, and tap “Test” to preview it. The tab title shows the countdown too.
No, and treating it as fixed is the usual way it fails. Deep work often needs 45 to 90 minutes to reach a productive state, while 10 to 15 minutes lowers the barrier for tasks you are avoiding.
Move, and look at something other than a screen. Scrolling on a phone continues the same kind of attention and provides little recovery — standing and looking into the distance also relieves eye strain.