Pomodoro Timer: Field Guide

See it in action

A real 25 / 5 session, sped up. This recording uses an external timer (a YouTube Pomodoro video), not this site's tool, but the technique is exactly the same.

Focus: 25 minutes on a cybersecurity course (Udacity's Fixing Security Vulnerabilities), taking notes in a terminal. Break: 5 minutes of the Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Swap in the Pomodoro Timer on this site and nothing about the method changes: same 25 / 5 split, same rule of stopping when the timer says stop.
4:26 · with sound

A TV episode is a risky break: it's made to keep you watching. What makes it work is the fixed timer. When the break ends, focus starts again whether the episode has finished or not.

Part 1

Set your split.

01

Focus minutes and break minutes

Classic Pomodoro is 25 minutes focus / 5 minutes break, and that's what's prefilled — but either field takes any value you'll actually commit to. Leave one blank or invalid and it silently falls back to the default (25 or 5) rather than blocking you.

02

These lengths lock in for the whole run

Once you hit Start, that focus/break split is fixed until you Stop. There's no mid-run way to change the numbers — stop and restart if you want a different split.

Part 2

Running the cycle.

03

Focus starts immediately

Pressing Start drops you straight into a Focus countdown — no confirmation screen. The ring runs green → red across the full focus length, same red/green language as Watch and Recall's Build phase.

04

Phases advance on their own

When the Focus countdown hits zero, the completed focus session is logged to history automatically and the timer flips straight into Break — no button press, no "phase complete" screen to click through. When Break then hits zero, it flips back into another Focus phase the same way. This repeats indefinitely; Focus sessions completed ticks up by one at the end of every Focus phase.

Only completed Focus phases get logged. A Break phase finishing doesn't add anything to history — breaks aren't tracked individually, only their total shows up in the stat tiles.

05

Pause holds the exact remaining time

Pause freezes whichever phase you're in — the countdown resumes from the exact millisecond it was paused at, in either Focus or Break. Nothing advances, and nothing is lost, while paused.

Part 3

Stopping.

06

Stop asks first, then ends the run

Stop confirms before doing anything. Whatever Focus sessions already finished naturally (and got auto-logged per Part 2) stay in your history — but the phase you're in the middle of when you hit Stop is discarded, not logged, even if it was almost done.

Part 4

Reading your history.

07

The three stat tiles

Focus sessions counts completed Focus phases only. Total focus and Total break sum the focus/break lengths that were in effect for each completed session — so if you change your split between runs, older entries keep whatever split they were logged under.

08

Each row is just the split and a timestamp

Unlike Watch and Recall's history, there's no bar chart, no badges, and no delete button here — each entry is a flat line: 25:00 focus / 5:00 break plus when it completed. Simpler by design, since a Pomodoro session doesn't carry the same "earned vs. spent" relationship Watch and Recall tracks.