Watch the time disappear

Set the length before you start the work, not after you have already lost track of it. Pick one of the presets or type a custom number of minutes, and the wedge appears on the dial straight away, so you can see how big the block is before you commit to it. A 45-minute wedge covering three quarters of the face looks very different from a 10-minute sliver, and that difference is the whole point.

Put the dial where you can see it without looking for it. Full screen on a second monitor, a tablet propped against the wall, or a phone leaning on the desk all work. The value comes from noticing the wedge in your side vision while you keep working, rather than from checking it.

If digits are what pull you out of the work, turn the numbers off. Some people read the shrinking area and stay in the task, while others start doing arithmetic with the seconds and lose the thread. Try a session each way and keep the one that leaves you calmer.

Use it for the start of a task as much as for the end. Setting a small block, five or ten minutes, and watching that wedge run out is often enough to get moving on something you have been avoiding. For a longer stretch, pause rather than reset when you get interrupted, since resuming keeps the block honest.

The face is fixed at an hour and the wedge is a share of that hour rather than a share of your session. Set 25 minutes and the colour sweeps clockwise from the top until its edge sits exactly on the 25, covering a little under half the face. Ten minutes later the edge has travelled back to the 15 and the wedge is a quarter of the circle. Wherever the edge lands, it points at the number of minutes you have left, which is what the fixed hour scale buys and what a dial stretched to fit each session would throw away.

The figures underneath say the same thing to the second, if you leave them on. The one place the two scales part company is the line read out to screen readers, which reports the percentage against the length you chose rather than against the hour: with 15 minutes left of a 25 minute block it says 60 percent remaining while the wedge is a quarter of the face. Both readings are correct, and neither asks you to work anything out.

At zero the figures turn accent-coloured, the line beneath them reads that time is up, and three short tones play. Most browsers refuse to let a page make any sound until somebody has interacted with it, so click once on a freshly opened tab if you are counting on hearing the end rather than seeing it.

Eight presets cover most uses: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. The custom field takes any whole number in the same range, one minute to sixty, and while the timer is stopped you can tap one of the twelve numerals on the face instead, which beats typing on a tablet propped against a wall.

The length you last used is kept in this browser together with the two display switches, so the dial comes back the way you left it rather than resetting to a default every morning. Changing the number part-way through a run does not rescale the wedge already shrinking; the new figure waits for the next Start. If you wanted to change the run itself, press Reset and set the length from a stop.

Sixty minutes is the ceiling because the face is an hour and a wedge that wrapped past twelve o'clock would stop meaning anything. Longer work is better run as two blocks with a genuine break between them, and if the break is the part you keep skipping, the Pomodoro timer enforces it for you.