Pomodoro worked for two days,
then you stopped

Everyone recommends it: work 25 minutes, rest 5. You tried it. The first day was genuinely good. So was the second. On the third you started the timer, picked up your phone ten minutes in, the timer ran out on its own, and the day produced nothing.

The technique is not broken and neither are you. Pomodoro works perfectly well for a great many people. It fails for people who find one specific thing hard — and that thing is not concentrating for 25 minutes.

Pomodoro is a time management technique. It solves how to divide time. But the place you get stuck is not the dividing, it is the starting — that two-second gap between pressing start and doing the work is precisely what the technique has nothing to say about.

Then there is its accounting. In classic Pomodoro, a session you break off does not count. The rule is coherent — but look at who it punishes: the person who has trouble starting. For them, "anything you began but did not finish counts for nothing" makes the attempt itself expensive.

The outcome is familiar. After a few failed days, people stop starting the timer at all. The technique is not abandoned so much as never attempted.

You can do this without an app. Three changes are enough:

1. Shrink the unit. If you cannot start 25 minutes, start 2. Two minutes is hard to say no to, and after two minutes it is hard to stop. The aim is not to work for two minutes; it is to be past the first two.

2. Set the break to your own size. If five minutes feels short, lengthen it. If a long break every four sessions is too rare, make it every two. These numbers belong to you.

3. Park the interruption instead of ending the session. Write the intruding thought down and move on. "I should check that delivery" does not have to kill the session.

A caution: none of this solves not knowing what to do. A timer will not tell you what to work on. If you are frozen in front of a vague task, the step before the timer is breaking the goal into steps.

FocusFlow has two timer modes: Warm-up 2 and Focus 25. The warm-up is not the session; it exists to stop starting from being a decision. When the two minutes end you either move into the 25-minute focus or you don't.

You can extend the focus timer by 5 or 15 minutes while it runs — being interrupted by your own clock makes no sense once the work is flowing.

The cycle numbers are yours to set: how many sessions before a long break (2–8), how long the short break is (1–30 minutes), how long the long one is (10–30). The defaults are 4 sessions, 5 minutes and 15 — and being defaults is the only thing special about them.

When something surfaces mid-session, it goes into the Brain Dump: locked until the session ends, waiting for you afterwards. An interruption does not have to become a stopped timer.

Worth saying plainly, because this page could be read as promising otherwise: FocusFlow does not remove the all-or-nothing rule. Cancel a session and that session earns you nothing — exactly the rule classic Pomodoro uses.

What changes is not the rule but the unit. A completed session earns 1 XP and 1 Focus Coin per minute. A 25-minute session pays 25; a 2-minute warm-up pays 2. That is different from zero, and — because it can actually be finished — it is a difference you collect.

So the offer is this: for someone who cannot finish 25 minutes, a unit that can be finished. Making the losable bet smaller is a more honest fix than pretending there is no bet.

Focus Coins turn into rewards you define yourself in the Dopamine Bank — a coffee, half an hour of a game. You set the reward and you hand it over; we do not send you anything physical.

Completed sessions are logged — how long, which mode, when they ended — along with the optional state ratings you add, and that is what your insight screens are built from. Deleting your account deletes them.

The timer works with no account. It is tied to nothing beyond the random identifier created on first launch, and usage analytics is off by default.

This paragraph says the same thing as our privacy policy. A marketing page that sounds more optimistic than the policy is the worst thing to trust.