A Pomodoro timer for ADHD, with movement built into the break

Now the honest part, because you have almost certainly been sold a timer before.

What this page is not

This is not treatment. PomoFit is a timer with exercises in it. It is not care, it is not therapy, it is not medication, and it is not a substitute for any of those. If you are working with a clinician, nothing here replaces that conversation, and a browser tab has no business pretending otherwise.

It is also not a page that will tell you movement makes you focus better. That claim is everywhere in this category and the evidence does not support it. We will get to what the evidence does support, which is smaller and more useful than the marketing version.

What is left after you remove all that is still worth your time. A timer is a piece of external structure. If the hard part of your day is not caring about the work but deciding when to start it and when to stop it, external structure is exactly the right kind of tool.

The decision a timer takes off your plate

Two moments cost more than they should.

The first is starting. An open-ended task has no edge to grab. “Work on the report” is not a thing you can begin. “Work on the report for 25 minutes” is, because the end is visible from the start and you are only agreeing to the 25 minutes.

The second is stopping. Sometimes you cannot stop, and three hours vanish and your back hurts and you have not eaten. Sometimes you stop constantly and none of the stops were planned. Either way, the decision about when to break is being made in the middle of the work, by the part of you that is currently busy.

A timer moves that decision out of the moment and into a setting you chose earlier, when you were not mid-thought. That is the whole mechanism. It is unglamorous and it is real.

What the movement break actually does

Every PomoFit break puts a short guided bodyweight exercise on screen. Ten air squats. A set of push-ups against the desk. Thirty seconds of marching on the spot. Something specific, so the break is not another open-ended decision.

Here is what that is good for, stated at the strength the research actually supports.

• Energy and mood, reliably. A large meta-analysis of 158 studies covering 13,101 people (Reed and Ones, 2006) found acute aerobic exercise raises positive activated affect, meaning vigour and energy, at d=0.47, and the lift lasts at least 30 minutes. Low intensity worked consistently. You do not have to go hard for this one.

• Less fatigue across a long sitting day. A 2022 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE of micro-breaks under ten minutes found they significantly increase vigour and reduce fatigue.

• It does not cost you output. In 2026, 19,342 US adults took part in a movement-break study run through NPR’s Body Electric Challenge and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Among the 11,484 who completed it, work engagement rose 4 to 7% and performance 1 to 3%. It was uncontrolled and self-reported, so treat the numbers loosely. The direction is the point: the breaks did not take anything away.

And here is what it is not good for, which nobody in this category will tell you.

Movement breaks do not appear to make you think better. The same PLOS ONE analysis found the effect of micro-breaks on performance was not statistically significant, and on cognitively demanding tasks it was effectively zero. A small Columbia study of eight-hour sitting days (Duran and colleagues, 2023) tested five different walking-break schedules and no dose improved cognition. A 2016 BMJ Open trial found three minutes of light walking every half hour cut fatigue significantly and did nothing measurable to executive function or memory.

So: you will probably feel better and you will not think worse. That is the true version. If a competitor tells you their exercise breaks sharpen your brain, they have not read the papers.

The 25 minutes is not sacred

Francesco Cirillo picked 25 minutes in the late 1980s using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. No study derived it. There are only about four peer-reviewed studies of the Pomodoro technique in existence, and none of them anointed the interval.

This matters more here than anywhere else. Twenty-five minutes is short enough to be genuinely irritating if you have finally got traction on something, and long enough to feel impossible on a day when nothing will start. Neither of those is a personal failure. It is a default someone chose with a kitchen timer.

So change it. On the timer you can set the focus block and the break to whatever is true today.

• Fifteen on, three off when starting is the problem and you need the finish line close enough to see.

• Fifty on, ten off when you are already moving and a 25-minute interruption would cost you the thread.

• Twenty-five on, five off as a starting guess, not a rule.

When this makes things worse

An RCT published in Behavioral Sciences in 2025 put 94 students through a two-hour session using Pomodoro, Flowtime, or their own self-regulated breaks. There was no significant difference in productivity, task completion or flow. The Pomodoro group got tired faster (p=0.025) and lost motivation faster than the people choosing their own break points.

Read that honestly. Rigid intervals are not free. If you are someone who, once started, works well for long stretches, a timer that interrupts you every 25 minutes is taking something from you. Use longer blocks, or use the timer only on the days when starting is the wall. We would rather you used this three days a week and kept using it than followed a protocol for nine days and quit.

What a session looks like

1. Open the timer and set your interval. Nothing to install.

2. Work until it goes off.

3. The break screen shows one exercise. Do it, or skip it. Skipping is a button, not a confession.

4. Repeat. Long break after four blocks, or whenever you want one.

If deciding which exercise is itself a decision too many, the ready-made plans do that part for you. Energy Boost Cardio is the one to start with if the 3pm hour is where your day goes to die. Back Pain Desk Relief is for the days when the chair has won.

The free tier does all of this and needs no account. PomoFit Pro is $4.99 a month and adds personalised schedules, custom exercises, ambient audio and detailed stats. If you never pay us, the timer still works.

Who should skip this

Be honest with yourself about three things.

If you cannot stand being interrupted mid-flow, use long intervals or a different tool. If the exercise part sounds like one more thing to fail at, turn it off and use PomoFit as a plain timer. And if what you actually need is support from a person rather than structure from software, get that first. A timer is a small tool. It is not the answer to a large question.

If you want the reasoning behind the intervals rather than the tool, why the Pomodoro technique stops working covers the failure modes in detail, and what to do during a Pomodoro break covers the five minutes themselves.