Study Timer

Why most web timers drift

Browsers throttle background tabs. Once a tab is hidden, timers that count setInterval ticks are slowed to roughly one tick a second — and on mobile often far less, or paused entirely. A timer built that way quietly loses minutes over a 25-minute session, and you only notice when the chime arrives late.

This one records when you started and compares it against the clock, so the remaining time is worked out fresh every time it is displayed. Switch tabs, lock your phone, come back twenty minutes later: the count is right. The visible tick is only there to repaint the number.

How the Pomodoro technique actually works

1. Pick one thing. Not a list — one task. Name it in the box above so it lands in your history.
2. Work for one block, classically 25 minutes, without switching to anything else.
3. Take the short break. Properly — stand up, look out of a window. Scrolling is not a break.
4. After four blocks, take a long break of 15 to 30 minutes.

The 25 minutes is not sacred. Francesco Cirillo arrived at it by experiment, starting from blocks of 2 and 10 minutes; the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used is only where the name comes from. Deep work often runs better at 45 or 50 minutes; if you are anxious about starting, 10 is a perfectly good block. What matters is that the block is bounded and the break is real.

What the numbers are for

Getting more out of it

Name the task. "Revision" tells you nothing next week; "Chem paper 2, past questions" tells you exactly where the time went. The label is stored with the session.

Log the interruption, do not obey it. When something occurs to you mid-block, write it on paper and carry on. Almost none of them survive to the break.

Do not chase the streak. It is there to make consistency visible, not to guilt you into a token session at midnight. A broken streak costs nothing.

Choosing a block length that fits the work

Twenty-five minutes is a good default precisely because it is short enough that starting feels cheap. That is the whole mechanism: the hardest part of studying is the first ninety seconds, and a small block lowers the cost of paying it. But the length should follow the work, not the other way round.

Reading and note-taking survive interruption well, so 25 minutes suits them. Anything requiring you to hold a structure in your head — a proof, an essay argument, a piece of code, a translation — pays a reload cost every time you stop, and there 45 to 50 minutes usually produces more per hour despite the longer breaks. Rote work such as vocabulary or past-paper drilling goes the other way: 15-minute blocks keep the recall effortful, which is the part that actually builds memory.

If you are avoiding a task altogether, shorten the block until it stops being frightening. Ten minutes is a perfectly respectable unit of work, and a completed ten beats an abandoned fifty. Change the length in the settings above; the history keeps the real duration of each session, so shorter blocks do not flatter your totals.

What the breaks are for

The break is not a reward for the block; it is part of the method. Two things happen in it. The first is straightforwardly physical — looking at something more than a few metres away relaxes the focusing muscles in your eyes, and standing up restores the blood flow that sitting still has been quietly reducing. The second is that unforced attention lets the material you have just been holding settle, which is why solutions so often arrive on the walk to the kettle rather than at the desk.

Both effects need the break to be genuinely different from the work. A five-minute scroll through a feed keeps you looking at a screen at the same distance, processing language, at the same desk — it rests almost nothing. Standing up, getting water, looking out of a window and stretching is unglamorous and works. If you finish a break still thinking about the problem, that is fine; if you finish it having read forty opinions about something else entirely, the next block will show it.

The long break after four blocks matters more than it looks. Roughly two hours of genuinely focused work is a realistic daily ceiling for most people, and the long break is where you decide whether to spend another set or stop. Stopping while it is still going well is the single best predictor of coming back tomorrow.

Your data stays here

Sessions, settings and streak are stored in your own browser. There is no account and nothing is uploaded — which also means it will not follow you to another device, and clearing your browser data clears it.

The history is capped at the most recent 500 sessions, which is why the counter above is labelled "Last 500" rather than "All time" — at a few sessions a day that is several months of work, and it keeps the stored data small enough to stay fast. If you are timing written work rather than revision, the character counter keeps its own draft in the same way, and the readability checker will tell you whether the thing you produced in those blocks is actually readable.