Pomodoro Timer

Features

• Custom work, short break and long break durations
• Automatic cycling with a long break every N blocks
• Countdown in the browser tab title
• Audio alert generated in the browser, no file needed
• Daily session log kept on your device

How to use it

1. Set your work and break durations.
2. Optionally name what you are working on.
3. Press Start and leave the tab in the background.
4. The title bar shows the countdown while you work.

The technique, and why the timer is accurate

Francesco Cirillo developed the Pomodoro Technique as a university student in the late 1980s, naming it after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. The structure is deliberately rigid: work for one block, take a short break, and after four blocks take a longer one. The rigidity is the point, the fixed commitment makes starting easier, and the enforced break prevents the diminishing returns of grinding through fatigue.

Twenty-five minutes is a starting point rather than a rule. Deep technical work often benefits from 45 or 50-minute blocks, because the overhead of reloading context makes short blocks inefficient. Shallower work, email, admin, review, suits shorter blocks. The durations here are adjustable for that reason.

One technical detail worth explaining: browsers throttle setInterval in background tabs, often to once per minute, so a naive timer built by counting ticks drifts badly and can finish minutes late. This timer records the target end time when you press Start and computes the remaining time from the system clock on each tick. That means it stays accurate whether or not the tab is visible, and it recovers correctly if your machine sleeps mid-session.