Timers
5 Minute Timer
A five-minute countdown with an alarm at zero — the classic length for steeping tea, holding a plank, or taking a short break between tasks.
Countdown timer
Alarm and notifications
A short tone plays automatically when the timer ends, synthesised in your browser — nothing is downloaded or streamed.
Works even if you switch tabs
This timer tracks the clock time it should finish at, not a count of ticks, so switching tabs or locking your device never makes it run late. The tab title above shows the time left even while you’re looking at something else.
Five minutes: the standard steep time for black tea
Five minutes sits at the middle of most steeping guidance — shorter than that tends to leave black tea thin and underdeveloped, longer than that starts pulling out the tannins that make a cup taste bitter and astringent. It's specific enough that eyeballing it from the kettle across the kitchen rarely lands exactly right, and the difference between a four-minute cup and a seven-minute cup is large enough to notice on the first sip. Start the timer the moment the water hits the leaves, not when the kettle finishes boiling, so the five minutes actually measures steep time rather than time since boiling. Green and white teas want a much shorter steep — two to three minutes is typical — so switch to the custom entry rather than reusing this preset for those.
A five-minute sit for meditation
Five minutes is a genuinely common starting length for a meditation habit, short enough that the session itself never becomes the reason you skip it, and bounded enough that you don't spend the sit wondering how much longer is left. Set the timer, close your eyes, and let the alarm be the only clock-check you need — the whole value of a fixed countdown here is that you can stop tracking time entirely rather than periodically cracking an eye open to check a phone. Once five minutes feels comfortable and unremarkable, moving the custom entry up to ten or fifteen minutes is the natural next step; there's nothing about the practice that requires staying at five forever.
The five-minute rule for starting a task you're avoiding
A common trick for getting past procrastination is committing to only five minutes of a dreaded task — a stack of dishes, a first paragraph of writing, a box you've been avoiding unpacking — on the reasoning that starting is usually the actual barrier, not the work itself. Set this timer the moment you commit, and treat the alarm as an honest permission slip: if you want to stop at five minutes, stop, no guilt attached. In practice a lot of five-minute commitments turn into longer sessions once the initial resistance is past, but the timer's job isn't to trick you into working longer — it's to make the five-minute promise a real, bounded one instead of a vague intention that quietly evaporates.
A short break, five minutes at a time
Five minutes is also a common length for a deliberate short break between tasks — long enough to actually step away from a screen, refill a glass of water, or stretch, short enough that it doesn't eat into the next block of work the way an unbounded break tends to. Setting an alarm rather than trusting yourself to glance at a clock is what keeps a five-minute break from quietly becoming fifteen, which is the single most common way a short break stops working as a short break. Run it between rounds of focused work the same way you'd use it for tea or a sit — the timer doesn't care which of these it's for, only that five minutes is the length you asked it to hold.
Adjusting away from five minutes
Five minutes covers a genuinely wide range of common tasks, but it isn't universal — green tea wants less, a longer meditation sit wants more, and a break that consistently needs six or seven minutes is one custom entry away through the hours/minutes/seconds fields beside the one-tap presets. Nothing about switching off the five-minute preset changes how the alarm or the background-tab accuracy behaves; it exists purely to save a few taps for the cases people reach for most often.
Questions
- How long should black tea actually steep for?
- Black tea is commonly steeped for around five minutes, longer than the two to three minutes typical of green or white tea, because its more oxidised leaves need more time to release their flavour without the bitterness that oversteeping causes. Five minutes is squarely in the middle of most guidance rather than an extreme in either direction, which is part of why it became the default length people reach for without checking the box. If your particular blend recommends a shorter or longer steep, or you're brewing green tea instead, the timer's custom hours/minutes/seconds fields hold any length exactly — there's nothing special about the five-minute preset beyond being the one worth a single tap.
- Does five minutes of meditation actually do anything?
- Five minutes is a genuinely common length for people just starting a meditation habit, precisely because the barrier to sitting down for a session is often the biggest obstacle, and a short, fixed, alarm-bounded sit removes the open-ended feeling that makes a first attempt intimidating. Knowing an alarm will end it removes the temptation to keep checking a clock, which is itself a common source of restlessness during an unstructured sit. Five minutes is a starting point, not a ceiling — plenty of longer-established practices run 15, 20 or more minutes — but building the habit at a length you'll reliably actually do beats abandoning a longer session after a few tries.
- Why does setting a five-minute timer help with procrastination?
- The idea, sometimes called the five-minute rule, is that starting is usually the hardest part of a dreaded task, and committing to only five minutes lowers the mental barrier enough that you actually begin — once started, momentum frequently carries you well past the alarm, and even when it doesn't, five real minutes of progress on something you were avoiding entirely is still progress. The timer's job here is narrow but specific: it makes the five minutes a real, bounded commitment you agreed to rather than an open-ended 'I'll just start' that can quietly become an hour of avoidance disguised as preparation. When the alarm sounds, you get an honest checkpoint to decide whether to keep going or genuinely stop, rather than losing track either way.