A focus timer without your phone in the room

If you want a focus timer without phone involvement, the simplest version runs in a browser tab and needs nothing installed. That is what the PomoFit timer is, and this piece is about why that arrangement is worth choosing, including the part where the popular justification for it turns out to be shakier than it looks.

The study everybody quotes, and the replication almost nobody does

You have met this claim: the mere presence of your phone drains cognitive capacity even when it is face down and switched off. It comes from Ward and colleagues in 2017, it is genuinely striking, and it has been repeated in a thousand productivity articles.

In 2022 Ruiz Pardo and Minda ran a pre-registered direct replication of that experiment in Acta Psychologica, using the same tasks and the same six conditions of phone location and phone power. It did not replicate. There was no difference in performance between having the phone on the desk, in a bag, or outside the room, on either measure they used. Their conclusion is blunt: the mere presence of a phone may simply not be enough to affect cognitive performance.

That should change how the claim gets used. One striking result and one careful failed replication is not a settled effect, and a page selling you a timer has an obvious incentive to leave the second study out. So here it is at the top instead.

What did survive contact with the evidence

A stronger paper landed in 2025. Writing in PNAS Nexus, Castelo and colleagues ran a pre-registered randomised trial with a crossover design over a month. They enrolled 467 people and 313 completed everything, with one group blocking mobile internet on their phones for a fortnight while the other waited, then swapped.

Blocking mobile internet improved sustained attention (dz=0.23), mental health (dz=0.56) and subjective wellbeing (dz=0.45). The authors describe the attention effect as roughly the size of ten years of age-related decline, which is a vivid way to put a modest number.

Their own caveats deserve equal billing. The participants had volunteered specifically to cut down their phone use, with most rating themselves highly motivated to do so, and the authors flag placebo and demand effects as a live possibility. This is a study about people who wanted to use their phones less and then did, which is a narrower claim than the headlines it generated.

Note also what it is not. It is about removing the internet from the phone for two weeks, not about which device your countdown runs on. Nobody has studied that, and we are not going to pretend the gap is smaller than it is.

The argument that needs no study at all

Strip out the psychology and something plainer is left, and it is the actual reason to run the timer elsewhere.

You cannot read a phone timer without picking the phone up. Picking it up means unlocking it. And unlocking means a look at the lock screen, a surface designed by several of the world’s most capable companies to be difficult to look at without opening something. Six times an hour, at the exact moments your attention is already loose, you are performing the gesture the rest of your setup is trying to reduce.

None of that requires a mere-presence effect to be true. It is a description of a sequence of actions. Move the countdown to the screen you were already looking at, and the sequence stops happening.

There is a second, quieter benefit. A timer in a browser tab is visible without an interaction at all. You glance, you see the number, you carry on. Nothing was unlocked and nothing had a chance to interrupt.

What a focus timer without phone involvement buys you

• Nothing to install. No download, no permissions dialogue, no account and no email address. A tab opens and the thing works.

• The same on every operating system. Windows, macOS, Linux, a Chromebook, a borrowed machine, a locked-down work laptop where you cannot install software. Browser-first sidesteps the whole question.

• No notifications of its own. The countdown is on screen. It does not need permission to interrupt you because it never interrupts you.

• It closes. At the end of the day the tab goes and there is nothing left running on a device you take to bed.

The trade-off is real and worth stating. A browser tab needs the page loaded, so a genuinely offline day is a problem. And if your work happens on a phone, a browser timer on a laptop you are not using is pointless.

When the phone is the better place for it

Being straight about this matters more than winning the argument.

• Your work is not at a desk. Studying in a library with a book, practising an instrument, working in a workshop. There is no screen to put a tab on, and a phone timer face down is the sensible answer.

• You need the timer to survive a closed laptop. A tab does not.

• App blocking is what you actually want. That is a phone-side job and it needs a phone-side tool. The comparison for that sits on the Forest app alternative page, and blocking is not something PomoFit does or plans to do.

• A watch is doing the work. A wrist buzz is about as low-friction as a prompt gets, and it never involves a lock screen.

A setup that holds up on a normal Tuesday

Four steps, none of them requiring willpower.

• Put the phone somewhere that costs a few seconds to reach. A drawer, a bag, another room. Not because its presence poisons your working memory, since that is the bit that did not replicate, but because a small physical cost is enough to stop an idle reach that had no reason behind it.

• Open the timer in a pinned tab. Pinned means it survives the tab churn and stays where your eye already goes.

• Set the interval to fit the task, not the tradition. 25 and 5 for work that arrives in pieces, 50 and 10 for anything that needs loading first.

• Decide what the break is before you need it. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the break becomes five minutes of scrolling on the phone you just put in a drawer.

That last point is most of the reason PomoFit exists. When the block ends, a screen appears with one movement on it and its own clock already running. Air squats, calf raises, a set of desk-edge push-ups. You did not pick it, and that is deliberate: once a block has drained you, the picking is what costs. The twelve ready-made plans take the decision further away still, with Weekly Brain Fog Killer for the flat afternoons and Lower Body Wobble Leg for the days you have been in the chair since nine.

The claim we are not going to make about any of this

Moving your timer off your phone will not make you smarter, and neither will the movement in the break. That has been tested more than once and it keeps coming back empty. Experiments that broke a sitting day up with movement and then went looking for a cognitive benefit did not find one, and once the unpublished trials are accounted for, exercise’s short-term return on thinking lands close to zero.

What holds up is narrower. Movement raises energy and improves mood, reliably, for about half an hour afterwards. And a large 2026 study of desk workers taking five-minute movement breaks found engagement and self-rated output went slightly up rather than down, meaning the time you spend on the break is not being taken out of your work. Energy, mood, and no cost. That is the honest product.

What a browser timer adds is smaller still and entirely mechanical: one fewer reason to unlock your phone, twelve times a day. On its own that is not a productivity system. Combined with a break that has something in it, it is a working afternoon.

If you want the version of this written for a home office, it is at Pomodoro for remote workers. If the break itself is the part you have never solved, start at what to do during a Pomodoro break. Or just open the timer and leave the phone where it is. Pro costs $4.99 monthly if you eventually want a schedule tuned to you, movements of your own choosing, background sound and richer numbers.