White Noise
Constant power across all frequencies. Ideal for masking distracting speech.
FREQUENCY: HIGH
Pomodoro Timer
Four rounds, automatic breaks, and the background sound switching with each phase.
25:00
Ready
Nothing selected
Pomodoro Timer
🍅
Focus
Round 1 of 4
Focus
Short Break
Long Break
Focus Sound
Sound played during focus phases.
Break Sound
Sound played during break phases.
Cycles
Number of focus rounds before a long break.
Total: ~2h 25m
The technique in short
Francesco Cirillo devised it as a struggling university student in the late 1980s, using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro in Italian. The cycle is deliberately simple: pick one task, work for twenty-five minutes without interruption, take five minutes off, and after four rounds take a longer break of fifteen to thirty minutes.
The mechanism is not the timing. It is that the decision to keep working is made once, at the start of a round, instead of continuously. Cirillo also found that externalising the clock removed the urge to check it, which was itself a large part of the distraction.
What this timer does for you
The version here runs the whole cycle rather than just counting down.
- Focus rounds of 25, 30 or 50 minutes, with short breaks of 5 or 10 and long breaks of 15 or 30
- Two to eight rounds before the long break, with the total session length shown as you change it
- A separate background sound for focus and for break phases, switched automatically
- A two-tone chime at every phase change, so you do not need to watch the screen
- Skip and reset controls, and a round counter
Why the sound switches
Changing the audio at a phase boundary does something a chime alone cannot: it changes what the room is like. A heavy masking noise during focus and something open during the break gives your nervous system an unambiguous signal about which mode it is in, and after a few days the switch itself starts to carry the cue.
The defaults here are black noise for focus — near-silent, nothing to listen to — and forest sounds for breaks. Both are configurable in Settings; brown noise for focus and rain for breaks is the other common pairing.
Taking the breaks seriously
The most common way to break the technique is to skip breaks when a round goes well. It works for an hour or two and then it does not: sustained concentration is expensive, and the breaks are what make the fourth round resemble the first.
Get away from the screen if you can. Five minutes standing up, looking at something further than an arm away, is worth more than five minutes of scrolling in the same chair.
Common questions
How long is a Pomodoro?
Twenty-five minutes by convention, followed by a five-minute break. This timer also offers thirty- and fifty-minute focus rounds, since the right block length varies with the work and the person.
What happens after four rounds?
A long break — fifteen minutes by default, or thirty. You can set anywhere from two to eight rounds before it, and the total session length updates as you change the settings.
Can I use different sounds for work and breaks?
Yes, and that is the point of the phase switching. Settings has a separate picker for focus and break sounds; the defaults are black noise for focus and forest sounds for breaks.
What if I get interrupted mid-round?
Cirillo’s rule is that an interrupted Pomodoro does not count — either fend it off and continue, or reset and start again. In practice, write down whatever arrived and deal with it in the break.