90 minute focus · 20 minute break

What this page is set to

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One full cycle of 2 focus sessions runs 230 minutes, 180 of which is focus time. Fill an eight-hour day with this split and you spend roughly 6.3 hours focused across about 4 sessions.

You can change any of these numbers under timer settings. Changes are saved for this page only, so they never overwrite the settings on the home page or on another preset.

• 90-minute focus
• 20-minute short break
• 30-minute long break
• Long break after every 2 focus sessions

About the length

Ninety minutes usually arrives attached to a story about sleep cycles and ultradian rhythms. Be careful with that story: evidence that a 90-minute cycle governs waking attention is mixed at best, and individual variation plus how you slept last night matter far more.

The practical case is stronger than the physiological one. Reading a paper properly or untangling a gnarly bug spends its first twenty or thirty minutes purely on setup. If you want an hour of actual work on the other side of that, ninety is what it takes.

Two a day is plenty

These blocks are expensive. Schedule three and the third is usually theatre. Protect one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and let shorter splits carry the admin.

Open every file you need before you start and silence notifications. Two interruptions inside ninety minutes and you have paid the setup cost three times over.

Spending the twenty

The break after a 90-minute block is not a pause, it is recovery. Get away from the screen entirely — walk, eat, do something with your hands. Skip it and the second block of the day will not happen.

• Spend the last two minutes writing down where you stopped before you leave the desk.
• Make the coffee before the session, not during it. Removing reasons to stand up is most of the work.
• If ninety is too much, start at 75 or 60 and build up.
• A 30-minute long break arrives after two sessions — line lunch up with it and the day falls into two halves.

What belongs in a 90-minute block

A 90-minute block is an expensive resource, so what you put in it matters. The rule is simple: work with a high setup cost, that only produces a result once you reach the end, and that does not depend on anyone else replying. Anything that requires waiting on another person will stall mid-block, which makes it the worst possible fit.

Dropping a large task straight into a block turns it into an open-ended goal like "write the report". Break it down into something that can actually be finished in ninety minutes — for a report, "write a complete first draft of section three" is one block. Polishing belongs to a later block or a shorter session.

• Good fits: first drafts of long documents, close reading of papers or specs, tracking down a hard bug, a full practice exam.
• Poor fits: email and chat, scheduling, flashcards, anything waiting on someone else's review.
• End every block by writing the first action of the next one. That single line is the cheapest way to cut the next setup cost.