This study timer is set for 25 minutes of study and a 5-minute break, with chips for 45 and 50. Spend each round testing yourself rather than rereading, spend each break away from the screen, and spread your rounds on a subject across several days instead of cramming them into one.
How do I study with the Pomodoro Technique?
Give each round one subject and one active job. The timer handles when to stop. What you do inside the round decides how much sticks. If the rounds themselves are new to you, start with the Pomodoro Technique, done gently.
The best guide to that is a 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues, which weighed up ten common study techniques. Two came out with the highest rating: practice testing, which means quizzing yourself, and distributed practice, which means spreading study out over time. Rereading and highlighting, the two most students reach for first, rated low.
So a good study round looks less like reading your notes again and more like closing them and finding out what you actually know.
What should I do during a study round?
Make your memory do the work. The UNC Learning Center describes self-testing as an active strategy that makes study time more intense and more efficient. In practice:
- shut the book and write down everything you remember about one topic, then check
- work through flashcards, and put the misses back in the pile
- do past exam questions against the clock
- explain a concept out loud as if you were teaching it
Save the last minute of the round to jot down what you couldn’t recall. That list is where the next round starts. Patches will be asleep long before then, which makes him an undemanding study partner.
What should I do in study breaks?
Leave the screen and move. The University of Rochester’s Learning Center points out that most study happens on screens, so spending breaks on social media or email is a mistake. Its suggestion is to get up, walk around, stretch and get a drink of water.
Five minutes is enough to refill a glass, look out a window and come back. Leave your phone face down on the desk while you do. After four rounds the timer gives you a 15-minute long break; that’s the one for food and fresh air.
How long should study sessions be, and how often?
Short rounds, spread over days. Start at 25 minutes. The 45 chip matches UNC’s suggestion to quiz yourself for 45 minutes and then take a break, and 50 suits long problem sets.
How often matters more than how long. UNC recommends spacing study over several short periods across days and weeks rather than marathon library sessions. A large review of spacing research by Cepeda and colleagues found spaced study beat massed study, and that the further away the test, the bigger the best gap between sessions. Two rounds on a topic today and two more next week will usually serve you better than eight in one night.
Only in the app
This page is the timer and Patches. Doggydoro for iPhone is the rest of the room:
- Ten breeds to choose from, and a name of your own for yours
- Finds at the end of a session, kept in a collection
- Other apps kept out of the way while you focus, and a bedtime lock
- The countdown on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island
- A room you furnish with bones earned by focusing
- Eleven sounds to work under, sticky-note tasks, Logs and your streak
Other timers
- A Pomodoro timer with a dog in it: 25 minutes on, 5 off
- A 25 minute timer: 25 minutes on, 5 off
- A 50 minute timer: 50 minutes on, 10 off
- A 90 minute timer: 90 minutes on, 20 off
- A 15 minute timer: 15 minutes on, 5 off
- A visual timer, with a dog for company: 15 minutes on, 5 off
- A 5 minute break timer: 5 minutes on, 5 off
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