Built for the tab-closer in all of us.

Most productivity tools have a problem: they want your attention. Dashboard apps, streak notifications, gamified interfaces — the tools meant to help you focus end up competing for the same focus they're supposed to protect.

I wanted a Pomodoro timer that did the opposite. One that lived quietly in the menu bar, showed you a countdown, and got out of the way. No onboarding flows. No accounts. No cloud sync. Just a timer.

The gap

The existing options fell into two categories. Big apps with feature lists longer than your to-do list — calendar integrations, analytics dashboards, team sync, AI suggestions. And tiny utilities that worked fine but looked like they were built in an afternoon and hadn't been touched since.

Neither felt right. I wanted something small but considered. Something that respected the philosophy it was built on: that deep work needs fewer interruptions, not more interfaces.

What I built

Breaks is a menu-bar Pomodoro for macOS. It cycles through work sessions and breaks, logs each session to a focus journal, and tracks daily streaks. Global hotkeys let you start, skip, or reset a session without ever opening a window. Notifications fire when it's time to move — delivered locally by macOS, no push server required.

It's sandboxed, ships with no network entitlements, and stores everything in UserDefaults on your Mac. There's no account, no backend, no telemetry. Your focus data is yours.

Shipped and using it daily

Breaks is free and open source under the MIT license. I use it every day. If you find a bug or want to suggest something, open an issue on GitHub — that's where the project lives.

If it saves you a few context switches, it's done its job.