I was tired, distracted, and needed a timer. So I built one.

Why I made a minimalist Pomodoro app — and why simplicity was the whole point.

I was tired my whole day working without a program to keep me in check. Not tired like sleepy — tired like mentally scattered. I'd sit down to write a function, and five minutes in I'd be answering a message, then checking something, then back to a different task I remembered halfway through the first one. By the end of the day I had twelve tabs open and nothing actually finished.

The problem wasn't focus. The problem was I had no structure. Without something telling me "you are doing this thing right now, for this amount of time" — I just... didn't. I was doing one job and immediately I stopped and was doing other jobs I had. It sounds obvious when you write it out. But when you're in it, you don't notice until you look back at four hours of work and realize none of it moved forward.

The Problem with Modern Productivity Tools

I looked at existing Pomodoro timers. There are a lot of them. The problem is most of them feel like they were designed by someone who really, really wanted you to know all the features they built. Sign up for an account. Sync your tasks. Here's a stats dashboard. Here's a Spotify integration with its own settings panel. Here are twelve font options.

I just wanted a timer. Set it, start it, work, stop when it rings. That's the whole thing.

I just wanted a timer to use, so with a program I can spend exactly the time I want and also take a small break — without many distractions.

That's actually what a Pomodoro timer is supposed to be. The original technique from the '80s used a physical tomato-shaped kitchen timer. There were no settings. You twisted it to 25 minutes and that was it. The constraint was the point. The moment you start tweaking timers and adding task categories and tracking streaks, you've made the productivity tool into another thing you procrastinate with.

Building for Radical Simplicity

So I built mine around one rule: the main page is simple and easy to use with no distractions. You see the timer. You see a start button. That's it. You don't even have to think about it.

Here's a real scenario I kept running into with other apps: I'd open a timer because I wanted to focus, and I'd spend eight minutes setting it up. Choosing session length, setting a break ratio, picking a sound, deciding whether to enable auto-start on breaks. Then I'd be kind of tired from all that and check my phone while it ran. Completely defeated the purpose.

With my timer, you open it and you click start. Done. The default session is 25 minutes because that's what works for most people most of the time. If you want to change it, you can — but the app doesn't ask you to.

Features (If You Actually Need Them)

That said — options exist. My Pomodoro is simple, easy to use, and provides many options like music, themes, and many other small features. But the user is not forced to use any of them. All the features are hidden behind a settings menu, so the main page stays clean.

Think of it like a car. You don't need to know how the engine works to drive. But if you want to pop the hood, it's there. I made sure that the things I personally wanted — ambient music for deep work, a dark theme for late nights, control over session and break lengths — were all accessible without cluttering the first thing you see.

The feature list, if you care to look:

• Custom session and break durations
• Ambient background music (optional)
• Light and dark themes
• Auto-start breaks (off by default)
• Session counter so you know how many sprints you've done
• Keyboard shortcuts for people who live in the terminal

None of those show up when you first open it. You get a number and a button. That's intentional.

Focusing on What Matters

I use it every day now. Not because it's fancy — it's not — but because it works without me having to manage it. I open it, I click start, and suddenly there's a container around my work. Twenty-five minutes of "this is the thing I'm doing." When the timer goes off, I take five minutes and actually stop, walk around, drink water. Then another twenty-five.

It sounds stupidly simple. It kind of is. But simple was the goal. The whole point was to remove the friction between wanting to focus and actually focusing. Every feature I didn't add was a decision. Every settings menu I didn't build was intentional. The app being boring on the surface is the feature.

If you're the kind of person who jumps between tasks all day and ends up exhausted with nothing finished — this was built for you. Give it one session and see if it changes anything.