Pomodoro Timer

Focus timer with work/break cycles and session tracking.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data is never uploaded, never stored, and never leaves your device.

Counts down a focus session and the breaks between them — the pomodoro method, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer its inventor used, so a tomato timer and a pomodoro timer are the same thing — keeping a tally of completed focus blocks and letting you set your own lengths instead of the traditional 25, 5 and 15 minutes.

How to use it

1Choose Focus, Short Break or Long Break — switching resets the clock to that mode's length.
2Press Start; the button becomes Pause, and the bar beneath the digits drains as time goes.
3Adjust any of the three durations in the boxes at the bottom, each accepting 1 to 180 minutes.

Example

Input: Focus at its default 25 minutes, then Start
Output: 25:00 counting down; at 00:00 a short beep sounds and "Completed focus sessions" goes to 1

Only Focus increments the tally — finishing a break does not. Nothing advances automatically either: at zero the timer stops and waits, so you choose the next mode yourself.

What happens to your data

There is no account, no sync and no notification permission requested — the session tally is a counter in component state that returns to zero on reload, so nothing accumulates about how you spend your day. The countdown decrements that counter once per interval tick rather than re-reading the clock, which is worth knowing in practice: a browser that throttles timers in a background tab can let a session finish later than the wall clock suggests.

Last updated August 2026

It is half past ten, the document has been open three times, and each time something arrived before the first paragraph did. A countdown is the crude fix: a stretch in which the only permitted task is the one you named, and a stretch afterwards in which it is not.

Decide first which job the timer is doing, because the two pull apart. One is protective: the block keeps you off email for half an hour, and whether you finish anything is beside the point. The other is measurement, which is what the method was built for — the block is a unit, so you estimate a task at three and find it took seven. Measurement wants identical blocks you count and write down; protection does not care, and lets you set forty minutes when forty feels right.

What a timer cannot do is the part that actually fails. It will not stop a colleague at your desk, silence a phone or close the tabs, and a block spent resisting all three is not a focus block. The arrangements around the countdown do the work; the countdown marks the edges.

The common mistake is starting at the far end. Someone who cannot hold ten minutes sets ninety, breaks it twice and decides the method is not for them. Begin at a length you can finish, then raise it.

How it works

Toolvore holds one countdown in the page and takes a second off it on every tick, redrawing the digits and draining the bar beneath them. The end of a session is a short 880 Hz tone lasting about a third of a second, generated on the spot with the Web Audio API rather than played from a file. There is no notification, no change to the tab title and no colour change, so a muted tab is enough to miss the end; digits resting at 00:00 are the only lasting sign. Each of the three lengths takes whole minutes from 1 to 180, and a decimal is truncated, so nine and a half minutes is not available. Editing a length mid-run leaves the current countdown untouched; the new value lands when you reset or switch mode. Reset stops the clock and returns it to the mode's full length — the tally of finished sessions has no control of its own.

Common use cases

Breaking a long piece of writing into blocks you can start
Revising for an exam without the evening disappearing
Timeboxing a code review so it does not swallow the morning
Forcing a break away from the screen on a long desk day
Counting how many focus blocks a recurring task really takes
Working through a backlog of admin nobody wants to begin

Frequently asked questions

What is the pomodoro technique, and why 25 minutes?＋

A work rhythm devised by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s: a fixed block of single-task work, a short break, and a longer break after several blocks. The 25 minutes was one person's practical choice, a stretch he could commit to and time on a kitchen timer, rather than a finding about how long attention lasts. Nothing breaks if you change it. What matters more than the number is that the block holds one task and the break is genuinely taken — the break is what makes the next block possible, not a reward you can skip.

Is 25 minutes right for everyone, or should I use longer blocks?＋

It depends on how expensive it is to start. Work with no warm-up — replying, filing, tidying a list — suits short blocks, because the value is in beginning at all. Work you have to load into your head first suits longer ones. Two constraints hold either way. The break must be long enough to count as a break and short enough not to become a second task. And a length should stay fixed for a week before you judge it: the first days of any rhythm feel wrong whether or not it is right.

How many focus blocks fit into a working day?＋

Fewer than the arithmetic promises, and the gap is the useful part. A day contains meetings, lunch, the ten minutes after a meeting when nobody is any use, and messages that genuinely cannot wait. Plan for a handful of protected blocks rather than a full day of them, put them where your attention is best, and let the rest of the day absorb everything else. Counting blocks you finished rather than hours you sat is the honest measure: it is common to feel a day was wasted and find three real blocks in it.

What should I actually do during the short break?＋

The break works by being unlike the work. Stand up, fetch water, look at something further away than the screen, walk to the end of the corridor. What defeats it is anything with the same posture and the same kind of attention: a feed, a group chat, a quick reply that turns into three. Those hold you in the state the break exists to interrupt, so you come back without having rested. Working through it is the other failure — productive for one block, worse for the next two. Note where you were and go.

How many blocks before a long break, and how long should it be?＋

The usual rhythm is a long break after four focus blocks, running somewhere around 15 to 30 minutes. It does a different job from the short one: the five-minute gaps keep you going within a stretch, while the long break ends the stretch — eat, leave the desk, deal with what you were ignoring. Four is not sacred. If your blocks run 50 minutes, three is often enough before a proper stop; if they run 15, six may pass before you feel anything. Take it where starting the next block begins to feel like pushing.

What do I do if I am interrupted halfway through a session?＋

Separate the two kinds first. An internal interruption — remembering an email, wondering about a score, deciding to look something up — goes onto a scrap of paper in a few words and is dealt with in the break, and writing it down is what stops it circling back. An external one is a negotiation: say when you will be free, usually within the quarter of an hour, then return. If something truly cannot wait, abandon the block rather than half-running it. A block you ran the clock through was not a block.

Does the pomodoro technique work for deep or creative work?＋

That is the fair criticism of the method. If a task takes forty minutes to get into and you break every twenty-five, the timer is removing the thing you came for. Fixed blocks are strongest where starting is the problem — a task you keep avoiding, admin, revision, a first draft you cannot face. Where getting in is easy and staying in is valuable, use the clock to protect one long uninterrupted run instead, and let it mark the end of ninety minutes rather than chopping the ninety up. Some use a timer only to begin.

Is anything stored about how I spend my day?＋

Nothing is recorded. The three lengths you set and the count of finished sessions live only in the page's memory while the tab is open: nothing is written to your browser's storage, there is no account to attach it to, and no request carries any of it anywhere. Reload and you are back to 25, 5 and 15 with the count at zero. There is a cost to that — no history, no export and no weekly total — so if you are counting blocks to estimate a task, write the number down yourself first.