Visual focus timer

Because a number tells you the time and a shrinking shape tells you how much is left. Time blindness isn't an inability to read a clock, it's difficulty feeling duration pass. A disc that visibly empties turns an abstract twenty-five minutes into something you can see going, which is why the physical versions are a staple in ADHD and classroom settings.

Body doubling is working alongside another person, in the room or on a call, where their presence keeps you anchored to the task. It works, and a web page cannot do it, so this tool doesn't pretend to. What it does instead is the part that can be automated: your current task stays on screen and in the tab title while the timer runs. For real body doubling, call a friend and leave the line open, or join one of the free co-working rooms people run for this.

This one, and it needs no account, no download and no payment. It runs in the browser on a phone, tablet or laptop, and nothing you type leaves your own device. The reason a visual timer suits ADHD is that time blindness is a problem of feeling duration, not of knowing the clock, and a shape that visibly shrinks gives you the feeling a row of numbers never does.

Every line is one block: what you're doing, how many minutes you'll work, and how many you'll stop for afterwards. So a list can read 10 and 2, then 13 and 1, then whatever else suits the day, and the timer just follows it. Tap a name to run that one next, and the total above the list tells you roughly when the whole thing lands. Tick a block off with the circle when it's genuinely done and the next one takes over automatically.

No. Open the page, press Start, that's a valid session. The list is there for the days when writing it down helps and invisible on the days it doesn't.

Shorter than most timers give you. The break is suggested at about a fifth of the focus length, so ten minutes of work earns two off and forty-five earns nine, floored at two minutes and capped at ten. The reason is blunt: a long break is where the session dies. Getting up is easy, sitting back down after fifteen minutes on a phone is the part that doesn't happen, and it isn't a discipline failure, it's what a feed is built to do. A break you can return from beats a restful one you don't.

Something with an edge to it. Stand up, drink water, look out of a window, walk to another room. Anything that ends by itself when the timer goes. Scrolling, messages and videos are the ones that swallow the rest of the afternoon, because nothing in them tells you to stop. If you want a menu of the harmless kind, the Dopamine Menu tool on this site is a list of exactly that.

Yes, both ways. Each block on your list carries its own break, so a punchy ten minutes can be followed by two minutes off while a longer stretch gets more. If you're not using a list, the short and long breaks are plain number boxes you can set to whatever works, and the long one still arrives after every fourth round. Nothing starts without you pressing it, and every break has a skip next to it, because being told to rest by a website is its own kind of annoying.

Shorter than feels sensible. The point of the five-minute option isn't five minutes of work, it's getting past the start, which is where the whole thing actually breaks down. Most people keep going once they're moving. If five feels like nothing, that's the feature: nothing is easy to agree to.

Yes. The countdown is worked out from the clock, not from the tab being awake, so switching away or locking your phone won't lose your session. Leaving the page entirely will, though, since nothing is stored on a server.

A soft two-tone chime, which you can mute, and the option to take five or run it again. No blaring alarm, no streak to break, no guilt if you stop after one.