✦
Experiments

Focus session generatorNot twenty-five minutes
because somebody said so.

Twenty-five minutes is a good default and a bad universal. It came from one person's kitchen timer, and it is genuinely well suited to work you are avoiding and badly suited to work that takes twenty minutes to load into your head. Applying it to everything is how people conclude that deep work does not work for them.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

55 minutes
10-minute breaks · 2 rounds in 180 minutes

The round

  • Set a timer for 55 minutesPhone in another room. A phone face-down in the same room is still in the room.
  • Decide the one thing before you startOne sentence. Starting a session by deciding what to do inside it wastes the most valuable minutes you have.
  • Break for 10, away from the screenA break spent on a phone does not restore the thing the break exists to restore. Stand up, look out of a window, get water.
Session
55 min
Break
10 min
Rounds
2
Bound by
interruptions

55 minutes, 10 off, 2 rounds

The binding constraint is interruptions. Every other factor would have allowed a longer session, so lengthening it would only produce a session that ends badly.

This result contains something worth keeping.

Send it to EvyOS →

Nothing has left this device. The link carries the result in the part of a URL browsers never send to a server, and you will see exactly what it is going to create before anything is saved.

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Only the link and that one line are shared. Nothing you typed goes with it.

✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Say how long the work takes to get into

Writing and coding are slow to load; email and admin are instant. This changes the answer more than anything else.

2
Be honest about interruptions

An interruptible ninety minutes is not ninety minutes, and planning it as one guarantees a failed session.

3
Take the break properly

Away from the screen. A break spent on a phone does not restore the thing the break exists to restore.

The right length depends on three things: how long the work takes to get into, how much state you can hold before it degrades, and how likely you are to be interrupted anyway. A long session in an interruptible environment is not a long session; it is a short one with disappointment attached.

This gives you a length, a break, and a number of rounds — and where a short session is genuinely the right answer, it says so rather than pretending you should be doing ninety minutes.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

Start free →Everything else
✦ Questions

Focus session generator, answered.

It is a good default and a bad universal. It suits work you are avoiding and work that is instantly resumable, and it is poorly suited to anything that takes twenty minutes to load into your head — where most of the session goes on arriving.
How long before you are properly into the work. Writing and coding are typically fifteen to twenty-five minutes; email and admin are near zero. A session should be several times the load time or you are mostly paying the entry cost.
Because a ninety-minute session you never start is worth nothing, and a twenty-minute one you do start is worth twenty minutes. When resistance is high the goal is beginning, not producing.
Three or four genuinely good ones is most people's ceiling. Planning six produces two good sessions and four you feel bad about, which is worse than planning three.
Yes. The break exists to restore attention, and a phone is the same activity your work was competing with. Standing up and looking at something far away works considerably better.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

Start for free →