10 Minute Timer

About the 10 minute timer

Ten minutes is the tidying length. Long enough that a room changes, short enough that nobody argues about starting. It is also the standard break between school periods, the length of a decent stretching routine, and roughly how long a pot of rice needs to sit off the heat with the lid on before you touch it.

It is the most common length for the kind of meditation that people actually keep doing, for the same reason five minutes works for procrastination: the number is small enough to agree to.

Press start and the ring empties over the ten minutes. At zero, three rising notes, or none if you turn the sound off. The screen is kept awake while it runs, so a phone left face up does not dim halfway through.

Ten minutes is long enough that you will almost certainly switch tabs, which is the case this timer is built for. The remaining time is worked out from a deadline on the system clock, so nothing that a browser does to a hidden tab can put the count behind, and the alert still fires when the tab is not the one you are looking at. The tab title shows the time left, so the countdown is legible from the tab strip.

If you are timing something that repeats, such as ten minutes of work followed by a short break, the pomodoro timer handles the cycle and counts the rounds for you rather than making you restart this page each time.

Ten minutes is the interval that turns up in advice about attention, though the research behind it is less tidy than the advice suggests. The often repeated claim that students disengage after ten minutes of a lecture comes from a small set of studies with mixed findings, and later work found attention lapses arriving in waves throughout rather than at one fixed cliff. What survives is the practical part: changing what you are doing every ten minutes or so keeps people with you, whether or not the number itself is exact.

Ten minutes is also the standard length in meditation apps, and for the same reason five minutes works on procrastination. It is short enough to agree to on a bad day and long enough that something happens. If you are using it that way, put the phone face down after starting, because watching how long is left is the opposite of the exercise.

Ten minutes is the interval that turns up in advice about attention, though the research behind it is less tidy than the advice suggests. The often repeated claim that students disengage after ten minutes of a lecture comes from a small set of studies with mixed findings, and later work found attention lapses arriving in waves throughout rather than at one fixed cliff. What survives is the practical part: changing what you are doing every ten minutes or so keeps people with you, whether or not the number itself is exact.

Ten minutes is also the standard length in meditation apps, and for the same reason five minutes works on procrastination. It is short enough to agree to on a bad day and long enough that something happens. If you are using it that way, put the phone face down after starting, because watching how long is left is the opposite of the exercise.

Other lengths

• 1 Minute Timer
• 3 Minute Timer
• 5 Minute Timer
• 15 Minute Timer
• 20 Minute Timer
• 30 Minute Timer
• 1 Hour Timer