Focus Timer: Pomodoro-Style Study Blocks Linked to Your Real Coursework

What you actually see when you open it

The screen is one column and it fits on a phone without much scrolling. At the top, a pill tells you which phase you are in: FOCUS with a target icon, or BREAK with a coffee cup. Focus is tinted coral, the break is tinted teal, so a glance from across a library table tells you which side of the cycle you are on without reading anything.

Below that sits the countdown card: a large mm:ss timer set in tabular numerals so the digits do not jitter as they tick, a progress bar that fills across the width of the card as the phase elapses, and a one-line status underneath. That status reads "No focus blocks yet this sitting" before you have finished anything, then switches to "1 focus block done", "2 focus blocks done", and so on. If you have ever completed a block on that device, an all-time total is appended after a middle dot.

Under the card are two controls. The primary button is Pause while a block is running, and otherwise reads Start focus, Start break, or Resume, depending on the phase and on whether the current phase is partly elapsed. Next to it is Reset. On iPhone each of these carries a distinct haptic: a medium tap when you start or resume, a lighter one when you pause or reset, a selection tick when you pick a length, and a success pattern the moment a phase completes.

• A phase pill reading FOCUS or BREAK, color-coded coral and teal
• A large mm:ss countdown in tabular numerals, plus a progress bar for the current phase
• A live count of focus blocks completed in this sitting, with an all-time total appended
• Pause, or Start focus / Start break / Resume, plus a Reset that returns you to a fresh focus block
• Focus-length and break-length pickers, shown only while the timer is stopped
• A standing note that the timer keeps running in the background and will notify you when the phase ends

The four focus lengths and three break lengths

The focus picker offers 15, 25, 45, and 50 minutes. The break picker offers 5, 10, and 15. A fresh session opens on the classic Pomodoro pairing of 25 and 5.

Those numbers were chosen against a college timetable rather than an office day. Fifteen minutes is what an actual between-class gap gives you once you have walked across campus and sat down, and it is short enough that starting it does not feel like a commitment. Twenty-five is the standard Pomodoro interval and the sensible default if you have no opinion. Forty-five and fifty match the length of a class period, which is a useful anchor: you already know what it feels like to concentrate for a lecture, and 50 lines up with the longest session length Semora's Smart Plan will schedule for you.

Both pickers disappear the moment a block is running. This is intentional. A timer that lets you re-lengthen a phase mid-run is a timer that lets you quietly negotiate with yourself at minute 22, and the countdown you agreed to at the start would stop meaning anything. Pause first if you genuinely want a different length.

One consequence to know: changing a length while paused resets that phase's clock to the full new length. If you are 12 minutes into a 25-minute block, pause, and tap 45, you get a full 45:00 rather than 33 minutes of remainder. The button label changes back from Resume to Start focus to signal exactly that.

• Focus: 15, 25, 45, or 50 minutes
• Break: 5, 10, or 15 minutes
• Defaults: a 25-minute focus block and a 5-minute break
• Length pickers are hidden while a block is running, so nothing can be re-lengthened mid-countdown
• Changing a length while paused restarts that phase at the full new length

Starting a block from a task or a planned session

There are four ways in. The Me tab lists Focus Timer under Academic tools; the web app lists it in the sidebar under the same name; a task's detail screen has a Start focus session button; and every incomplete session on your Smart Plan has a small play button on its row.

The last two are the ones worth using. Opening the timer from a task passes that task's id and title through, and the screen shows a linked banner across the top reading "Focusing on" followed by the title. That title then appears in the completion notification, so the alert on your lock screen names what you were supposed to be working on rather than just announcing that time has passed. The Start focus session button is hidden on tasks you have already marked complete, since there is nothing left to sit down with.

Opening it from a Smart Plan session passes something extra: the block's own duration and its id. If that duration is not one of the four standard options — Smart Plan schedules in 15-minute increments and will shorten a block to fit the time left in your day — the picker grows an additional chip at the front of the row showing that exact length, labeled "plan" while it is selected. A 30-minute planned session therefore opens as a 30-minute focus block instead of being rounded to something the picker happens to like. Lengths passed this way are accepted between 15 and 180 minutes and rounded to whole minutes; anything outside that range falls back to 25.

Finishing a focus block that came from a planned session marks that exact session complete on your Smart Plan, which is the only lasting record the timer writes anywhere. There is one small piece of care worth knowing about: if you open the timer from one task, never start it, and then open it from a different task, the second task wins and the banner relabels. A session that is genuinely running, or paused partway through, is never overwritten by a new deep link.

What happens when the countdown reaches zero

Two things happen, and they are independent of each other on purpose.

The first is a notification. When you press start, Semora schedules a real date-triggered alert with the operating system for the exact moment the phase ends, with sound on. A finished focus block arrives as "Focus block done", and if the session was linked to a task the body names it: "Nice work on" your task title, "Time for a break." An unlinked block reads "Nice work — time for a break." The end of a break arrives as "Break over", with the body "Break's over. Ready for another focus block?" Because that alert lives with the OS rather than inside the app, it fires whether the app is foregrounded, backgrounded, or closed.

The second is what happens on screen. The timer advances to the next phase (focus becomes break, break becomes focus) and stops there, paused, with the full new length on the clock. It does not roll straight into the next countdown. You decide when the break starts, which matters when the block ended mid-sentence and you want ninety more seconds before you stand up. On iPhone you also get a success haptic at the moment of completion if the app is open.

Only a completed focus phase counts for anything. It increments the count for this sitting, increments the all-time total, and marks the linked Smart Plan session complete. Finishing a break increments nothing. Pausing and never coming back counts as nothing.

Leaving the app mid-block, and why the clock stays honest

Most naive timers store a remaining-seconds number and subtract one every second. That breaks the moment you switch apps, because background JavaScript timers get throttled or suspended and the counter silently falls behind reality.

Semora stores the timestamp at which the phase ends and recomputes the remaining time from the current clock twice a second while running. The displayed time is therefore correct no matter how long you were away — there is nothing to drift. The app also re-reads the clock the instant it returns to the foreground, so you never see a stale number for a beat before the next tick lands.

The running session is written to the device's secure storage, so it survives more than backgrounding. Force-quit the app mid-block, relaunch, reopen the timer, and you are looking at the correct remaining time on the correct phase with your cycle count intact. If the block finished while you were away, reopening the timer settles it up: the block is credited, the linked planned session is marked done, and the timer sits on a paused break waiting for you. The notification will already have arrived on its own.

Pausing cancels the scheduled notification so it cannot fire for a block you stopped, and freezes the remaining time exactly. Resuming schedules a fresh alert for the new end time. Reset cancels it too, returns you to a focus phase and zeroes the count for that sitting. One rough edge: resetting while a break is on the clock currently carries the break length onto the focus phase, so tap your focus length again to get the full block back.

What gets counted, and what does not

Two numbers are tracked. The sitting count is the number of focus blocks you have completed since your last reset, and it is what drives the "3 focus blocks done" line under the clock. The all-time number is a running total of completed focus blocks stored on that device.

Be clear about what that second number is. It is a local counter on one device, not an account statistic. It does not travel to your other devices or to the web app the way your courses and deadlines do through Semora's realtime sync, and signing in elsewhere will not bring it with you. Resetting the timer does not touch it.

Beyond those two counters, the timer keeps no history. There is no log of individual sessions, no chart of hours by course, no weekly focus report. Completed focus blocks do not feed Streaks, which are calculated from tasks completed on days that actually had work due, and they do not appear in Progress Insights. The one durable, syncing trace a focus block leaves is a Smart Plan session ticked off, which is genuinely the useful one, because that is what your plan reads when it rebuilds and works out how much effort a task has left.

Free versus Pro

The Focus Timer is a Pro feature in full. Free accounts that tap it get a preview screen (the clock icon, a short description, and a button through to the paywall) rather than a limited number of sessions.

That is worth stating plainly, because most of Semora's core is free and stays free. On a free account you get five syllabus scans per calendar month, up to four courses within one semester, one semester total, complete deadline and task tracking, grade tracking with weighted averages, same-day reminders, and free access to any Course Space a classmate invites you into. That is a working deadline tracker without paying anything.

Pro is $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year, which works out to about $1.67 a month on the annual plan. It is purchased inside the iOS app and the entitlement applies to your whole account, so the timer is available in the web app too even though there is no web checkout. Alongside the Focus Timer, Pro covers unlimited scans and courses, Smart Plan, the Workload dashboard, flashcards, the AI tutor, Grade Scale and Forecasting, calendar sync with .ics export, custom reminder timing at one and three days out with quiet hours, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, and Share and Streaks.

• Free: 5 scans per calendar month, up to 4 courses within one semester, one semester total, deadlines and tasks, weighted grade averages, same-day reminders, joining a classmate's Course Space | Pro: $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year, about $1.67 a month billed annually — plus Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import subject to school policy and platform configuration, and hosting your own Course Space
• Pro: $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year, about $1.67 a month billed annually
• Pro is bought in the iOS app and applies account-wide, including on the web
• Free users see a preview of the timer with a link to the paywall, not a trimmed-down version of it

How a focus block fits the rest of Semora

The timer is the last step in a chain the rest of the app builds. Your syllabus gets scanned into real deadlines. Smart Plan takes those deadlines and lays study sessions across the next two weeks, working around your class meetings automatically, in 15-minute increments, with a ten-minute buffer after each session so the schedule is something a human could actually follow.

The numbers line up on purpose. Smart Plan's session length setting offers 25, 45, or 50 minutes and defaults to 45, three of the four lengths in the focus picker. Its daily study cap offers 60, 90, 120, or 180 minutes and defaults to 90, which is two 45-minute sessions. Weekday sessions start at 5pm by default and weekend sessions at 10am, and you can turn weekends off entirely. So when you tap the play button on a planned session, the focus length you land on is the one your own planner settings produced, not a number the timer invented.

What you do inside the block is the rest of Semora's job. Flashcards can generate a deck for one specific tracked exam from the syllabus and any lecture notes you have uploaded, which is a good fit for a 25-minute block. The AI tutor answers from that course's actual syllabus, your notes, and your live deadlines when you get stuck, so you are not leaving the block to go searching. Grade Scale and Forecasting tells you which assignment is actually worth the next 50 minutes.

Who this is for, who it is not, and the rough edges

This is for you if your problem is starting. A named length and a linked task takes the negotiation out of the front of a study session, and 15 minutes on a specific paper is a much smaller thing to agree to than "work on the paper". It is also for you if you already use Smart Plan, because the play button on a planned session closes the loop between deciding to study and having studied.

This is not for you if you want a strict Pomodoro implementation. There is no automatic long break after four cycles, and no forced auto-advance from one phase into the next, every transition waits for you to press the button. It is not a distraction blocker, there is no ambient sound or music, and it will not report how many hours you put into each course this semester. If any of those are the reason you are shopping, this particular feature will not be the reason to subscribe.

A few edges to know before you rely on it. In the browser the timer runs while the tab is open, but the end-of-phase notification and the saved session are native-only, so a reload loses the block and no alert arrives — do timed work on iPhone or iPad and use the web app for planning. If you decline notification permission, scheduling is skipped and the on-screen countdown still behaves exactly as before; a failed notification is never treated as a failed session. And the quiet-hours setting that holds back deadline reminders does not suppress this alert, because you asked for it by starting a timer — an 11pm focus block will still tell you when it is over.

• No automatic long break after four cycles, and no forced auto-advance between phases
• No app blocking, website blocking, or built-in ambient sound
• No per-course time totals, session history, or weekly focus report
• On the web, no end-of-phase notification and no session saved across a reload
• A denied notification permission is skipped quietly; the countdown itself is unaffected