Focus

About these tools

Every other category here takes something in and hands something back. You give it a file, a string, a set of numbers, and it returns a converted version. The tools in this one are different in kind: nothing goes in and nothing comes out, because what they do is run.

A pomodoro timer is a session. It starts, it counts, it changes what it is doing at intervals you set, and the useful thing about it is not a result but the fact that it is still going. A task list is a state. It holds what you have not done yet, it survives you closing the tab, and it has no output beyond itself.

That difference is the whole reason this category exists. The rest of the site is built on one template, because two hundred tools all having the same shape is what makes them consistent and what makes each one cheap to add. Forcing a running timer into a form with a run button would have made that template worse for everything that genuinely is a form. So there is a second surface for these, and it is deliberately narrow: adding a third tool to it means being seen to do it.

The timers here store when they started rather than how much is left. That sounds like a detail and it is the difference between a timer that works and one that does not. A browser throttles background tabs aggressively, so a countdown that subtracts a second on every tick loses minutes while you are reading something else, and cannot survive a reload at all. Reading the clock and subtracting cannot drift, cannot be throttled, and comes back exactly where it was.

Everything is kept in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere, which is true of the whole site and worth repeating here because a task list feels more personal than a file conversion. It is also not synced. It will not appear on your phone, and clearing site data clears it, which is the honest trade for never having asked you to make an account.

No streaks, no badges, no daily goals. A tool that guilts you about yesterday is a tool that gets closed.