Focus until you stop, then take the break you earned

Start before you feel ready

Choose one task, link it if you want the session credited, and press start. The clock counts up with no target and no bell, which removes the main reason people avoid starting: there is no block of time to commit to in advance.

Stop when attention actually breaks

Stop the clock when you notice yourself drifting, reaching for your phone, or finishing a natural unit of work. That moment is the signal Flowtime uses. Stopping is not a failure, it is the measurement.

Take the break you earned

The break is your stretch divided by the ratio, with a floor of 2 minutes. Forty minutes of focus at 1:5 earns eight minutes. The countdown starts on its own and beeps at the end, and you can skip it if you would rather keep going.

What gets recorded

Each completed stretch writes its true length in whole minutes to the shared focus log and adds one session to the linked task. One stretch counts as one session regardless of length, so your session count stays a count of times you sat down and the minutes stay the honest number.

The Pomodoro technique has one real weakness, and it is the bell. A fixed interval cannot know whether it is landing in a lull or in the middle of the best twenty minutes of your week, and being pulled out of a task you were absorbed in costs more than the break returns.

There is one randomized comparison of these approaches. Smits, Wenzel and de Bruin (2025, Behavioral Sciences) put 94 students through two-hour study sessions using self-regulated breaks, strict Pomodoro, or Flowtime. Strict Pomodoro produced faster-rising fatigue, and both structured conditions showed motivation dropping faster than self-regulated breaks did. Productivity, task completion and flow did not differ. One trial with students is not settled science, but nothing in it supports the idea that a fixed bell gets more work out of you.

What the evidence does support is that breaks help at all. Ariga and Lleras (2011) found that brief pauses prevent the usual decline on a long attention task. The mechanism says take breaks; it never named an interval. Flowtime keeps the break and drops the interval. If you want the longer argument about interval length, the best Pomodoro duration guide works through what the numbers can and cannot tell you.

Flowtime is not automatically better. It asks you to notice your own state and stop honestly, which is harder than obeying a timer. If you are avoiding a task entirely, a short fixed block is usually the better tool, because the hard part there is starting rather than being interrupted.