A pomodoro timer with a pet that waits for you

How to use it

1. Pick one thing to work on. One task per session — the technique falls apart when a session has three.
2. Press Start. Your pet settles down to sleep for 25 minutes. The countdown also runs in the browser tab, so you can watch it from another window.
3. Work until the bell. If you get distracted, write the distraction on a piece of paper and carry on. Chasing it is the thing that costs you the session.
4. Take the break properly. Stroke your pet until it purrs, drag a snack onto the ground to feed it, or tap it to play. Five minutes away from the screen is the point of the five minutes.
5. Every fourth session, take a longer break. Fifteen minutes. Stand up.

Focused minutes earn coins, and coins buy scenes, themes and new animals in the shop. You can change the session lengths, move or resize the clock, pick its typeface, and turn the weather sounds down in settings.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

Work for 25 minutes, rest for 5, and take a longer break after four rounds. That is the whole method. It was named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer in the late 1980s, and it survives because it is small enough to actually do: it asks you to start, not to concentrate, and starting is usually the hard part.

The 25 minutes matter less than the fact that they are bounded. A task with no end is something to avoid; a task with a bell at the end of it is something you can begin.

Does a pomodoro timer help with ADHD?

Many people with ADHD say they work better against an external clock than against their own sense of time, and a visible countdown is one of the most commonly suggested ways to make time feel concrete. A pomodoro timer gives a task a visible edge, a start you can press, and a finish that arrives whether or not the work went well.

A pet adds a second thing that is easy to underrate: something is waiting on the other side of the session. A break with a small ritual in it — feed, stroke, play — is easier to actually take than a break that is just an absence of work, and taking breaks is the half of this method most people skip.

PetPomo is a timer, not a treatment. It is not medical advice and it is not a substitute for speaking to a doctor or a specialist about ADHD or anything else.

Why a pet, and why it gets harder to abandon

A plain timer is a number going down. Nothing about it changes if you use it every day for a month, and nothing about it notices when you stop.

Your pet does. It gets hungry while you are away and settles when you come back. It has a mood you can read at a glance — content, happy, affectionate, grumpy, sad, or unwell — and that mood is the sum of how you have treated it, not a random number. Look after it and it is delighted to see you. Disappear for two days and it is genuinely out of sorts when you return, and putting that right takes more than one biscuit.

None of that makes you focus. What it does is give the habit somewhere to accumulate. After a few weeks the sessions stop being a thing you make yourself do and start being a thing you and something else do together, and that is a much easier thing to keep.

An aesthetic pomodoro timer that changes with your day

The world is painted, not photographed, and it is never quite the same twice. It runs on your device's clock, so dawn is dawn where you are, and it moves through six times of day into a night with real stars. It reads your local weather and paints it: cloud, fog, rain you can hear, snow, and storms with distant lightning. And it follows the season, the right way round for your hemisphere — a December session is midwinter in London and high summer in Sydney.

• Living Room — Warm lamp light and a real-clock window.
• Garden — Drifting clouds, swaying flowers, a butterfly.
• Jungle — Deep canopy with fireflies after dark.
• Treehouse — Up in the branches. A bird passes through.
• Mountain — An alpine meadow under snow-capped peaks.
• Snowfield — Deep winter. Drifts, laden pines, cold blue light.

The animals

Every animal is built and animated in the browser rather than drawn as a sprite, which is why each one moves like itself: a horse walks on long legs and a bear does not, and a dog's tail sits up where a cat's sits level. They sound like themselves too — the bark, the meow, the bleat and the moo are all generated from the same synthesiser with different settings, and how often you hear them depends on the animal's mood and the hour. Nothing says much at 3am.

• MochiCatGinger tabby. The original.
• BiscuitDogA dog. Ears down, tail up, barks at the bell.
• PipPuppyA puppy. All head and no patience.
• WinterHorseA horse. Long neck, longer legs, a mane that catches the light.
• BirchDonkeyA donkey. Enormous ears, and opinions about the timer.
• MarigoldCowA cow. Horns, a broad wet nose, and all the time in the world.
• CloverSheepA sheep in a very good coat. Unhurried.
• JuniperDeerA deer. Antlers, long legs, ready to bolt.
• BarleyBearA bear. Slow, round, and surprisingly good company.

Common questions

Is PetPomo free?

Yes, completely. Coins are earned by focusing and can only be spent inside the game.

Do I need an account?

No. Your progress lives in your browser. Optional cloud sync uses a random code your own browser generates, so the server stores a save without ever learning who you are.

Does it work offline?

Yes. After your first visit the whole game is cached and runs with no connection. Only the live weather needs the network, and without it the world shows fair weather.

How does it know my weather without asking permission?

It uses the approximate location our host already attaches to every web request, rounded to about eleven kilometres before it is used. Your device location is never requested and no permission prompt appears.

Can I use it for studying?

That is most of what it is for. Set the focus length to match your attention rather than the default — 25 minutes is a starting point, not a rule — and use the long break to leave the desk.

What happens if I abandon a session?

It is not counted in your stats, and your pet is briefly sad about it. That is the entire penalty. Abandoning a session you were never going to finish is a reasonable thing to do.

More on the method and the thinking behind it on the blog, or read about how the world is built on the about page.