Pomodoro timers

Focus and break lengths are a trade between depth and stamina. Each rhythm below opens a timer already set to it, with a short note on who it suits and what it costs. Not sure? Start with 25/5, and move up only if you keep being stopped just as you get going.

• 20/520 min focus, 5 min breakTwenty minutes on, five off. It is the gentlest rhythm on this site, and that is the point.
• 25/525 min focus, 5 min breakThe original: 25 minutes of focus, 5 minutes of rest, repeated. Francesco Cirillo built the technique around a tomato-shaped kitchen timer in the late 1980s, and this is still what most people mean by a pomodoro.
• 30/530 min focus, 5 min breakThirty minutes of focus and a five-minute break: the classic pomodoro with a little more runway.
• 30/1030 min focus, 10 min breakHalf an hour on, ten minutes off: a rhythm that treats the break as seriously as the work.
• 40/1040 min focus, 10 min breakForty minutes of focus and a ten-minute break: long enough for depth, short enough to keep the rest of the hour.
• 45/1545 min focus, 15 min breakForty-five minutes on, fifteen off: three quarters of the hour working, and a break long enough to be a real one.
• 50/1050 min focus, 10 min breakFifty minutes of focus and a ten-minute break: a full working hour with the transition built in.
• 52/1752 min focus, 17 min breakFifty-two minutes on, seventeen off: an oddly specific rhythm that came out of a productivity-tracking study.
• 60/1060 min focus, 10 min breakA full hour of focus, then ten minutes to reset. Fewer interruptions, more depth, and a demanding rhythm.
• 90/1090 min focus, 10 min breakA ninety-minute round with a short ten-minute reset, for people who want the long block without the long pause.
• 90/2090 min focus, 20 min breakNinety minutes of deep focus followed by a proper twenty-minute rest: the longest rhythm on this site.

Want a length that is not listed? Any focus from 5 to 120 minutes and break from 1 to 90 works by address, for example /pomo-timer-35-7.