20 Minute Timer

About the 20 minute timer

Twenty minutes is the nap length. Sleep researchers keep landing on it because it is short enough to end before the deep stage begins, and waking out of deep sleep is what produces the grogginess that makes people say naps do not work for them. Twenty minutes in, and you wake from light sleep.

It is also the study block that people who cannot sit still for an hour can actually hold, the length of a short podcast segment, and roughly what a tray of roasted vegetables wants at a high oven temperature before it needs turning.

Press start and the ring empties over the twenty minutes. Three rising notes at the end. If you are using this to nap, leave the sound on and put the device within earshot but out of reach, so that stopping it requires sitting up.

The count comes from a deadline on the system clock rather than from ticks accumulated while the page is watched, so putting the phone face down or switching to another tab does not slow it or stop the alert. The screen is also kept awake while it runs, which matters on a phone that would otherwise sleep long before twenty minutes are up.

If twenty is one part of a repeating pattern rather than a one off, the pomodoro timer runs work and break lengths of your choosing and counts the rounds.

The best known twenty minute rule has nothing to do with sleep. The 20-20-20 guideline for screen work says that every twenty minutes you should look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds, which lets the muscle that holds your eyes focused up close relax. It is the one piece of eye strain advice optometrists broadly agree on, and it fails almost entirely because nobody remembers to do it. A timer is the whole intervention.

For the nap, the twenty minutes is time asleep rather than time lying down, so if you take ten minutes to drop off, a twenty minute timer gives you ten. Setting twenty five or thirty is the usual correction. The ceiling matters because deep sleep begins somewhere after the twenty to thirty minute mark, and being woken out of it produces the heavy, worse than before feeling that makes people conclude naps do not suit them.

The best known twenty minute rule has nothing to do with sleep. The 20-20-20 guideline for screen work says that every twenty minutes you should look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds, which lets the muscle that holds your eyes focused up close relax. It is the one piece of eye strain advice optometrists broadly agree on, and it fails almost entirely because nobody remembers to do it. A timer is the whole intervention.

For the nap, the twenty minutes is time asleep rather than time lying down, so if you take ten minutes to drop off, a twenty minute timer gives you ten. Setting twenty five or thirty is the usual correction. The ceiling matters because deep sleep begins somewhere after the twenty to thirty minute mark, and being woken out of it produces the heavy, worse than before feeling that makes people conclude naps do not suit them.

Other lengths

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