Roughly a fifth of the time you just worked. Enter your block length to get the break it earned — and what to do with it so it actually restores you.
A useful rule of thumb: take about a fifth of the time you just worked. That is where the well-known pairings already sit — 25/5, 50/10, 90/20 — and it scales sensibly in between.
The ratio matters far less than whether the break is a real one. A break spent scrolling keeps your attention in the same exhausted mode it was already in, which is why people finish a 10-minute pause feeling like nothing happened.
Stand up, leave the desk and look at something further away than your screen. Five minutes away restores more than fifteen minutes of scrolling.
About a fifth of the time worked, rounded to whole five minutes.
| You worked | Break | Known as |
|---|---|---|
| 25 min | 5 min | Classic Pomodoro |
| 30 min | 5 min | — |
| 40 min | 10 min | — |
| 45 min | 10 min | — |
| 50 min | 10 min | Double Pomodoro |
| 60 min | 10 min | — |
| 75 min | 15 min | — |
| 90 min | 20 min | Ultradian block |
| 120 min | 25 min | — |
The useful distinction is not long versus short, it is whether your attention changes mode. Focused work uses directed attention — the effortful kind you aim at something. A restorative break lets that go: move, look out of a window, get water, stand somewhere else. Attention wanders instead of being pointed.
Scrolling a feed does the opposite. It is still directed attention, still a stream of small decisions, just with worse content. That is why five minutes of walking often restores more than fifteen minutes on a phone.
Stepping away from a problem is not time off from it. Insight tends to arrive when you stop pushing — in the shower, on the walk, halfway through making coffee. If you fill every gap with input, you never give the background process room to run.
Leaving a note before you break makes the return cheap: one line about what you were doing and what comes next. Coming back to a clear next step removes the worst part of restarting.
After three or four blocks, a short break stops being enough. That is what the long break is for: 15 to 30 minutes, ideally with food, daylight or movement. Skipping it is the most common reason an afternoon collapses.
And if you are drifting in the first five minutes of a block, the honest answer is usually not a better technique. It is that you needed a longer break an hour ago.
About 20 minutes. At that length a short pause will not cut it — the break needs to be long enough to actually leave the task, move, and let your attention shift mode.
Around 10 minutes. Long enough to stand up, move and look at something far away, short enough that getting back in is easy.
After a 25-minute block, yes — provided you actually leave the desk. Five minutes of standing, stretching and water works. Five minutes of scrolling does not, which is why the break often feels like it did nothing.
No. A timer going off mid-flow is information, not an order. Flow is rare and expensive to re-enter — ride it out and take the break when it breaks naturally.