25 / 5 work cycle
A minimal timer on the Pomodoro rhythm — 25 minutes of focused work, then a 5-minute break — to protect deep work from distraction.
The Pomodoro technique breaks work into short, protected intervals: twenty-five minutes of single-tasking, then a five-minute break, repeated. The constraint does two things at once — it makes starting easy (anyone can focus for twenty-five minutes) and it makes distraction visible, because interrupting the interval means breaking a clear commitment.
The timer is deliberately bare: one job at a time, one clock, no accounts or logs. Its purpose is to give your important, non-urgent work — the kind that loses to interruption — a block of uninterrupted time with a defined end.
Press start and work on one thing until the timer flips to a break. Don't switch tasks mid-interval; if something comes up, note it and return to it in the break. When the break ends, the next focus block begins automatically.
The mode label tells you whether you're in a focus block or a break. Use the breaks — they're part of the method, not a failure of it — to rest your attention so the next block stays sharp.
The only number that matters is whether the current block is protected. Treat a completed focus interval as a small, real unit of progress. Over a few cycles the rhythm compounds: several protected blocks in a day tend to produce more than hours of fragmented, half-attentive work.
Use it for work that needs sustained concentration and keeps losing to interruption — writing, coding, studying, thinking — especially the important-but-not-urgent work that never feels urgent enough to protect on its own.
Facing a report you keep avoiding, start one focus block and commit only to those twenty-five minutes. Starting is the hard part; once the timer is running, the interval usually carries you past the resistance, and a couple of cycles later the draft exists.
Underlying idea: Eisenhower Matrix ›