Pomodoro Timer

Most Pomodoro timers go quiet the second you click away. You start a focus block, switch to your editor or a textbook or a Google Doc, the browser throttles the background tab, and the session ends in silence. So you blow past the break, or you sit there working long after the break was already over. This one is built to reach you. When a phase ends it plays a chime, fires a browser notification, and keeps a live countdown running right in the browser tab title, so you get pulled back at the right moment even when the timer is nowhere on your screen.

Under that, it runs the classic cycle for you: a focus block, a short break, and a longer break after a set number of rounds. Set your own lengths, press Start, and it rolls from focus to break and back on its own, keeping a tally of the pomodoros you've finished. It's free, runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you enter is uploaded or stored on a server.

1. Set your lengths. Adjust Work (25 minutes by default), Short break (5), and Long break (15) if the defaults don't fit you. The Rounds field is how many focus blocks happen before a long break, four is the classic number.
2. Turn on the alerts you want. The chime is on already. Tick Browser notification and allow it when your browser asks, so the alert can pop up even when this tab is hidden behind your work. Auto-start next phase is on too, which keeps the cycle flowing without you clicking between blocks.
3. Set the volume and test it. Drag the volume slider and hit Test sound until it's loud enough to hear from across the room but not startling.
4. Press Start. Commit to a single task for the block rather than a whole list.
5. Work until the chime. When the block ends you hear it, see the notification, and the break begins on its own. When the break ends, a brighter chime tells you to get back to it.
6. Pause, Skip, or Reset. Pause holds your exact remaining time so you can step away and resume. Skip jumps to the next phase. Reset returns everything to the first focus block and zeroes your count.
7. Share your setup. The Share button copies a link with your exact lengths and alert choices baked in, so you or a study group can reopen the same timer later.

Settings are locked while the timer runs so you can't change a length by accident mid-count. Pause first, adjust, then continue.

Real focus means the timer is not the thing you're looking at. You're down in your editor or a doc in another window, wherever the work actually is. So the timer has to come find you, three ways at once.

The chime is generated right in your browser, and the two ends of a phase sound different on purpose. A finished focus block plays a warm, descending tone, that's your cue to step away. When a break ends you get a brighter, rising one instead, so you know to get back to it without checking the screen. After a day or two you stop needing to look, the sound alone tells you which way the timer turned.

The browser notification is the one that works when the tab is fully buried or minimized. It pops a small message telling you which phase just ended and how long the next one is. It needs permission the first time, which your browser handles with a one-click prompt, and that permission is per site and revocable whenever you want. If you'd rather not grant it, the chime and tab title still do their job.

The tab title countdown is the quiet one. While the timer runs, the browser tab reads something like 12:04 Focus, so a glance up at your row of tabs shows the time left with the tool sitting off-screen.

The clock is anchored to a target end time and recalculated from your device's own clock on every update, rather than subtracting a second per tick and hoping the ticks keep coming. Browsers slow down background tabs, and a tick-counting timer drifts badly because of it, but this one holds steady, so a 25-minute session ends 25 real minutes after you start it, even if you spent all 25 in another window.

The classic 25 and 5 is just a starting point. Change it to fit you. The core idea is alternating focused work with a real break, and the exact timing is yours. Match it to your attention span and the task in front of you.

Situation	Try	Why
Standard focused work	25 / 5	The classic default, good for most tasks
Deep work you fall into easily	50 / 10	Fewer interruptions once you're in flow
Low energy, or a task you dread	15 / 5	A lower bar to start when you're stalling
Long creative or exploratory work	90 / 20	Room to load a big problem into your head
Detailed, error-prone work	Shorter blocks	Fatigue shows up as mistakes, so rest sooner

Pick an interval and stick with it for at least a week before changing it. Swapping lengths every session stops you building the habit and gathering any useful data on what helps. It also helps to estimate tasks in pomodoros before you start, a small fix might be one block, a big refactor five, which slices an intimidating job into approachable pieces.

How you handle interruptions largely decides whether the method works for you. Francesco Cirillo, who came up with the technique in the late 1980s using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro is Italian for tomato), split them into two kinds. An internal one is a stray thought from your own head, I should reply to that message, did I pay that bill. Leave it alone rather than acting on it, and jot it on a notepad in a few words and deal with the list during your break. An external one comes from someone else, a colleague, a call. Try to defer it, a quick "give me ten minutes" often works. If you genuinely have to break, the honest rule is that the pomodoro is void, so start a fresh block afterward rather than counting a fragmented one.

For studying, it turns an open-ended "I'll study until I get it" into a run of small wins, and the breaks are when memory actually settles. For coding, a clean habit is tying one block to one commit and letting the next be the tests, and many developers stretch to 50 and 10 so a hard bug doesn't get cut off mid-thought. For writing, it beats the blank page because the ask is just 25 minutes of putting words down instead of a whole finished draft.

For ADHD focus, the appeal is the external structure. Focus is hard to hold in your head, so the timer does the remembering, and the alerts carry the transition when your attention has already wandered off, and shorter blocks tend to work better than the standard twenty-five. This helps a lot of people, it isn't medical advice, so tune it to what works for you.