Study timer with focus music
Focus
25:00
Then a 5 min break
Open in Spotify to follow the playlist. Not logged in? The player plays 30-second previews.
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The short version
Why 25/5, with rain
How to use it: press Start for a 25-minute study block and a 5-minute break, with rain or a Nova lo-fi playlist in the background. Use each block for one job, ideally testing yourself rather than rereading, and take a longer break after four rounds.
Twenty-five minutes is short enough to start on a hard subject, and four rounds make a solid study session. Move to 50/10 once 25 minutes regularly feels too short.
What to play
Nova Sounds playlists on Spotify. The first one is also under the timer above.
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First pick · about 25 min
Lo-Fi
Relaxed lo-fi beats with a steady pulse and no lyrics in the way: familiar study-session sound that fades into the background. It includes a few seasonal tracks.
Open in Spotify -
Also good · about 25 min
Classical
Solo piano and guitar for reading-heavy subjects where a beat feels like too much.
Open in Spotify
A study session that uses the evidence
- Pick one topic per block. Write it down before you press Start.
- Test, do not reread. Close the book and write or say what you remember, then check. Practice testing is one of the two techniques a major review rated highest (Dunlosky et al. 2013).
- Space it out. Come back to the same topic on later days instead of one long cram. Distributed practice is the other high-utility technique in the same review.
- Use the break for a real break. Stand up, drink water, look out of a window. Skip your phone if you can.
- Stop after four rounds. Take the long break or end the session.
Music or silence?
Use quiet, lyric-free music or rain for practice problems and review. For reading new material or memorising, try silence or plain noise first. If you study with lyrics, keep them for copying notes or tidying up, not for learning.
Fixed breaks or when you feel like it?
Biwer and colleagues (2023) compared fixed-interval breaks with breaks taken whenever students wanted, in a study of 87 students. In that study, the self-regulated group studied for longer stretches but reported more fatigue and distraction and less concentration and motivation, with no difference in how much they finished. A fixed timer is a reasonable default.
What the research says
Evidence notes: Dunlosky et al. (2013) rated practice testing and distributed practice as high utility, and highlighting and rereading as low. Background music mostly has no effect on performance and tends to hurt memory and language tasks, especially with lyrics (Cheah et al. 2022).
Related
All activitiesQuestions
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One that starts in a tap and keeps accurate time when you switch tabs. The Pomodoro rhythm of 25 minutes of work and 5 of rest is a good default; try 50/10 for long problem sets.
It depends on the task. A 2022 review by Cheah and colleagues found background music mostly has no effect and tends to hurt memory and language work, especially with lyrics. Quiet instrumental music or rain suits practice problems better than reading new material.
Four 25-minute blocks with breaks make a solid two-hour session. More than that is fine if your focus holds; if it drops, spread the work across days instead.
Yes. It runs in any modern phone browser and asks the browser to keep the screen awake while it runs, on phones that support it. There is nothing to install.
Sources
- Dunlosky et al. (2013), Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques, PSPI (abstract)
- Biwer et al. (2023), fixed vs self-regulated breaks, British Journal of Educational Psychology (abstract)
- Cheah et al. (2022), Background music and cognitive task performance: a systematic review, Music & Science