Pomodoro timer

How to use it

The Pomodoro technique is four rules long, which is most of why it survived since Francesco Cirillo named it in the late 1980s after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer:

1. Pick one task and name it. A round with no named task quietly becomes a round of reading tabs.
2. Set 25 minutes and start. Leave the countdown somewhere you can see it.
3. Work on that task only until the timer ends. Anything else that surfaces goes on the list, not into your attention.
4. Take five minutes off, away from the screen. Then go again.

After the fourth round, take a longer break — fifteen to thirty minutes. That's the whole method. The counter under the ring above tracks where you are in the set of four, and if you leave “start the next round automatically” on, the timer walks the focus/break sequence for you.

Why 25 minutes, and when to ignore it

Twenty-five is short enough to start when you don't feel like starting, which is the actual problem most days. Starting is the expensive part; once the ring is moving, continuing is cheap. A 25-minute commitment is small enough that your brain doesn't argue with it.

It's also short enough to be wrong for a lot of work. If your job is writing, proving something, debugging, or anything where you spend the first ten minutes rebuilding a mental model, a 25-minute round can end right as you get useful. Interrupting that on purpose, four times an hour, is worse than not using a timer at all.

So the honest advice is: start at 25, and if you keep resenting the bell, raise it. Fifty minutes with a ten-minute break is a common landing spot. Ninety is fine if you can hold it. Use the custom field above and the timer will take any length from one to 180 minutes. The technique's value isn't the number — it's that a decision about how long to work got made before you started working, instead of being renegotiated every few minutes.

What breaks a round, and what to do about it

In practice a focus round almost never dies from boredom. It dies because you remember something. You need to reply to someone, you think of a better way to do the thing you're not doing, you remember a bill. The thought itself is not the problem; the problem is that the only way to stop it repeating is to deal with it, and dealing with it ends the round.

Writing it down solves this, but only if writing it down is nearly free. If capturing a stray thought means switching to another app, waiting for it to load, finding the right list, and typing — you've already left. So the capture surface has to sit in the same place you're already looking. That's why there's a task list next to the timer on this page rather than a link to one, and why the desktop app puts a full markdown notepad in the same window as the countdown.

The other common killer is the break. Five minutes on your phone is not a break from a screen; it's a different screen with a faster reward loop, and coming back from it is harder than coming back from staring out a window. Stand up. The instruction is boring because it works.

What this timer does and doesn't do

It counts down, it sequences focus rounds and breaks, it keeps a task list, and it puts the remaining time in the browser tab title so you can read it from another tab. The countdown is derived from the clock rather than from a per-second tick, so a backgrounded or throttled tab doesn't drift — a mistake plenty of browser timers still make. Once the page has loaded there are no network requests, so a dropped connection doesn't stop your round.

What it doesn't do: it has no account, no sign-up, no ads, no analytics, and no cross-device sync. The task list is written to this browser's local storage and read back from it. It never travels. If you clear site data or open a different browser, it's gone — that's the trade for a tool that never asks who you are.

It also doesn't score you. There's no streak, no productivity grade, no weekly report telling you that Tuesday was 68 % focused. That's a deliberate omission, and it's most of the reason Focusbox exists at all — the app it comes from was built after giving up on a tracker that measured everything.

The app behind this page

This page is a single-purpose version of Focusbox, a small desktop app for macOS and Windows: a countdown, a checkable task list, and a markdown notes page, side by side in one window. It's free, the source is public under the Focusbox Community License, and by default it stores everything on your own machine with no account and nothing tracked. If you want your tasks and notes on more than one machine, there's optional end-to-end-encrypted sync — zero-knowledge, so the server only ever holds encrypted blobs.

The browser version of the full app, notepad included, is at the web app. The desktop build is the better one: it keeps a live countdown in the macOS menu bar, remembers its window, and doesn't disappear when you close a tab.

Download free for macOS & Windows

Questions

Is this Pomodoro timer really free?

Yes — free, no sign-up, no ads, no analytics. Nothing you type on this page is transmitted anywhere.

How long is one Pomodoro?

Twenty-five minutes of work, then a five-minute break; a longer 15–30 minute break after every fourth round. Treat those numbers as a default, not a law.

Does it keep counting if I switch tabs?

Yes. The remaining time is computed from the clock, not from a tick loop, so background throttling can't make it drift. The tab title shows the countdown too.

Does it work offline?

After the page has loaded, yes — there are no network calls. For something that's always there without a tab open, use the free desktop app.

Where does my task list go?

Into this browser's local storage, and nowhere else. It isn't synced, shared, or sent to a server. Clearing site data clears it.

Is this FocusBox.io?

No. Focusbox at focusbox.net is an independent local-first app made by one person; it has no connection to focusbox.io or focusbox.ai, and no AI or team features.