Pomodoro timer

How long should a pomodoro break be?

Five minutes after each block of work, and fifteen to thirty after the fourth. The short break exists to stop the next block starting tired rather than to be restful in itself, which is why five is enough and why standing up matters more than what you do with the time. The longer break is where the actual recovery happens, and skipping it is the usual reason the afternoon blocks feel worse than the morning ones.

This timer advances through the sequence for you, so there is no decision to make at the end of a block and nothing to reset.

Why 25 minutes?

Because it was long enough to get somewhere and short enough that starting felt easy, which is the entire insight. There is nothing biological about the number. If 25 leaves you stopping mid-thought, longer blocks are not cheating, and if starting is the hard part then shorter ones are the better tool. What the technique is really doing is making the unit of work small enough to begin.

What do you do when a pomodoro gets interrupted?

The traditional answer is that an interrupted pomodoro does not count and you start the next one fresh, which sounds severe but is the point: it makes the cost of an interruption visible instead of letting the block quietly degrade into half-work. In practice, note what interrupted you and carry on. A list of those notes after a week is usually more useful than the session count.

Does it track how many I have done?

The free timer counts today’s completed blocks, which is enough to answer whether this afternoon went anywhere. Pro keeps fourteen days of history with daily streaks, stored in your browser rather than any account, so you can see whether the good days cluster and what they have in common.