Tide

25 is just the default from Cirillo's kitchen timer, not a finding. No study establishes an optimal length. Pick what fits your work.

Break research favours longer breaks. 5 may be too short.

After every 4 rounds.

Adds a minute to each break as fatigue accumulates. One study found rigid 25/5 built fatigue faster than flexible pacing.

Off means you decide each time. Nothing starts behind your back.

Two soft notes with a long tail — a timer is a low-urgency alert, so it is built for low annoyance rather than urgency.

Two slightly detuned sine waves, one per ear. Headphones required — on speakers the tones mix in the air and the effect disappears.

A soft masking layer for a loud room or roommate.

Naming a specific first action before you start ("when I start, I will…") is the best-supported thing in this whole app — Gollwitzer & Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies put it at d = 0.65 on goal attainment. Vague labels like "homework" do not carry that effect.

A 22-study meta-analysis (Albulescu 2022, PLOS ONE) found micro-breaks reliably raise vigor and cut fatigue — but the effect on actual performance was not statistically significant. We are not going to tell you otherwise.

No streaks, no leaderboard, no broken-chain graphic. There is no evidence base for it, and the people most drawn to focus tools are the most likely to be hurt by it. Your round count resets every day and nobody is watching.

If the bell rings while you are actually rolling, take the +5. The popular claim that stopping mid-task helps you resume comes from the Zeigarnik effect, which does not reliably replicate.