5 Minute Timer
5:00
Five minutes is too short to accomplish much and that is exactly the point. It is the length you set when a task has been sitting on your list for nine days and you have stopped being able to look at it directly. Nobody argues with five minutes.
What 5 minutes is good for
- Breaking a stall on something you have been avoiding
- Tidying one surface, not the room
- A first pass at an email you are dreading
- A break that does not turn into an afternoon
Where it falls down
Too short for anything that needs a running start. If the work takes ten minutes just to load into your head, five minutes ends before you have begun.
Using it well
Name one task before you press begin — not a subject but a task, the kind of thing that can be finished or not finished. Put the phone in another room rather than face down; the difference between silenced and requiring you to stand up is the whole intervention. And stop mid-sentence when it rings, because returning to an obvious next keystroke is far easier than returning to a blank page.
If you set the timer and then still do not start, the problem is not the length. It is the crossing, and no timer configuration fixes that — a timer has nothing to say about whether you began. That is what body doubling is for.
Common questions
- Is five minutes long enough to be useful?
- For starting, yes — that is most of its value. A large share of avoided tasks are avoided at the threshold rather than in the middle, and five minutes is short enough that the threshold stops being defensible. Many five-minute sessions run long, which is the intended failure mode.
- Does the timer keep running if I switch tabs?
- Yes. It counts against a wall-clock deadline rather than ticking down, so a backgrounded tab — where browsers throttle timers — still shows the true time remaining when you come back.
Other lengths
- Online timers
Working timers for every focus length, with the honest case for each one.
- ADHD Timer
A free ADHD-friendly visual timer with 5, 10, 20 and 25-minute starts, ambient sound and no account. Start small, then continue if focus arrives.
- 10 Minute Timer
A ten-minute timer that runs in your browser. Long enough to finish something small, short enough to agree to on a bad day.
- 15 Minute Timer
A fifteen-minute timer that runs in your browser. The standard unit for admin, tidying, and anything you have been putting off.
- 20 Minute Timer
A twenty-minute timer that runs in your browser. A gentler alternative to the standard pomodoro, and often a better fit.
- 25 Minute Timer
A twenty-five minute timer that runs in your browser. The standard pomodoro length, and the default unit for focused work.