How the cycle works
Press start and work for twenty-five minutes with nothing else open that can interrupt you. When it rings, stop — even mid-sentence — and take five minutes away from the screen. After four rounds the timer gives you a longer break of fifteen minutes instead.
The colour of the ring and the label above it tell you which phase you are in, so the answer to "am I working or resting?" is readable from across a room without reading a word. By default the next phase starts on its own so the cycle flows; switch that off if you would rather confirm each transition yourself.
Why the intervals are honest here
Each phase stores the moment it should end, not a number being counted down. A browser that throttles a background tab — which every browser does — cannot make a session quietly overrun. That matters more for this tool than any other on the site, because the entire method depends on twenty-five minutes actually being twenty-five minutes.
Pausing and resuming is exact for the same reason. Skip moves you to the next phase without waiting, which is useful when a meeting eats a session.
Adjusting it to your work
- 25 / 5 — the original. Best for work you have been putting off, because starting is easy.
- 45 / 10 or 50 / 10 — better for writing, code and analysis, where a break at twenty-five arrives just as you have got going.
- 15 / 3 — useful on a bad day, when even twenty-five minutes feels like too much to commit to.
- Rounds — how many focus sessions before the long break. Four is standard; two suits a short afternoon.
Your settings are saved in your own browser, so the timer opens configured the way you left it. Pair it with a soundscape from the speaker icon — there are three focus presets, all generated live in your browser rather than streamed from anywhere.
The part people skip
The breaks are not the reward for the work; they are what makes the work repeatable. Spending the five minutes on a different screen is the most common way to make the method stop helping. Stand up, look at something further than arm's length away, get water. Then come back.
If you want a plain countdown instead of a cycle, use the 25 minute timer or any custom duration.