The Pomodoro Timer That Survives You Closing the Tab

DeepWork is a free focus timer, task manager and calendar for Windows, macOS, Linux and the browser, and it keeps every record on your own disk

It is 2:47 in the afternoon and you have fourteen tabs open. One of them is a focus timer. You started a session in it an hour ago, then closed it along with the rest, because that is what you do with tabs.

Ninety seconds later you cannot remember whether you were twenty minutes in or forty. The session is gone. So is the intention behind it.

That is not a productivity problem. That is a software problem, and it is the one this article is about.

Why every focus timer I have tried ends up closed

The pattern is always the same shape, and I have been through it enough times to recognise it early.

You find a timer. It is beautiful. It asks you to create an account, or it asks you to pick a plan, or it explains that your sessions are syncing to the cloud so you can pick up on your phone. You enter your first task. You start a block. Somewhere in the second block a notification arrives telling you to hydrate, or that a teammate has commented on something.

By Thursday you have muted it. By Friday you have stopped opening it.

The timers that survive past a week tend to share one property: they behave like software on your computer rather than like a website you are visiting. They keep running when the window is small. They remember what you were doing. They stay quiet until the timer actually ends.

That is what I wanted, so I built it. It is called DeepWork, it is free and open source under the MIT licence, and the rest of this article is what it does and why you might want it.

If you already know you want to look at it, open the web app in the next thirty seconds and come back. Nothing to install, no account, no email field. The rest will still be here. And if you want to know when the next release lands, a follow is the cheapest way to find out.

The one decision that shaped everything

DeepWork has no account system. There is no sign in, no profile, no server of its own. Everything it knows lives in a SQLite database on the machine you are sitting at, in the folder your operating system keeps for applications.

I want to be precise about what that buys you, because “local first” gets used loosely.

It means your focus history for the last six months cannot disappear because a company changed its pricing. It means the app opens on a plane, with the Wi-Fi off, on the version you installed. It means nobody is A/B testing a redesign of your timer. And it means the only person who can read your journal entries is you, because there is nowhere for them to go.

Three things leave the machine, and I would rather list them than let you wonder. There is a once-per-startup check against GitHub to see whether a newer version exists. There is an installer download, but only if you press Update. And there are the links you click, which open in your real browser. That is the whole list. The browser build adds a visitor counter so the page can answer “is anyone actually using this”, and there is a switch in Settings that turns it off completely.

The trade for all of this is in a later section, and it is a real one. First, though, let me show you what a day with it looks like.

A day with DeepWork, from the first block to the last

I will not walk you through every screen. Ten pages is too many to describe in a row, and reading a feature list is not how anyone decides to use something. Instead, here is the day the app is shaped around.

Morning: work out what actually matters

You open DeepWork and land on the Dashboard. Twenty five minutes on the clock, a ring waiting to fill, a daily goal of eight sessions, and the tasks you have booked for today underneath it.

Behind that is the page I end up on most mornings. The Matrix is the Eisenhower grid, four quadrants and drag and drop between them. Do First, Schedule, Delegate, Eliminate. Dragging a card from Schedule to Do First is a fifteen second decision that saves you an hour of pretending everything is equally urgent.

The other thing that happens in the morning is the Today page. A task lands on today for one of three reasons: it is due today, it is overdue and still open, or you starred it. Starring is the override, and it is how you say “this one, today, whatever the date says”.

The block itself: a timer that rings until you answer it

You press Start, or you press Space if you are not typing in a field. The ring fills. Short break after the first three blocks, a longer one after the fourth, and you can change all of those lengths in Settings if twenty five and five are not your numbers.

When the block ends, the app does not send one polite chime and hope you noticed. It rings, shows a card, and posts a system notification, and then it repeats every interval you chose until you answer. Start, skip and stop all count as answers.

Two details here are the kind of thing you only notice after a week. Every repeat moves to the next colour of a twelve entry palette, so the alert you have been ignoring for six minutes is visibly a different colour than the one that started. And every alert carries its own line of text, drawn one per session from a list of twenty four for a finished focus block and twenty four more for the end of a break. Step away. Come back. It never shows you the same sentence twice in a row.

Ticking a task off is deliberately quieter. A card appears with a line from a third list, and no sound at all. You tick off tasks dozens of times a day; an app that rang for each one would train you to mute it, and then the session alert would be muted too.

The middle of the day: shrink it and forget it

This is the feature I would keep above all the others. DeepWork does not disappear into your other windows. Press minimise on any page and it does not vanish into the taskbar. It shrinks into a small always on top widget, 136 by 76 pixels, with the countdown ring, the time, and play, skip, stop and expand.

It sits in the corner over your editor while you actually do the work. You can start and pause without bringing the full window back. Press Escape and it grows back to exactly where it was.

And when you press the close button, the app does not quit. It goes to the system tray and keeps running, so a session can finish and ring while the window does not exist. Tray then Exit is what actually quits, and if you prefer the close button to quit, that is a setting.

The first launch asks you about three of these things before changing anything: start with the system, stay always on top, keep running in the tray. Nothing is enabled unless you say so. No installer writes a startup entry behind your back.

Afternoon: the calendar that schedules in pomodoros

The Calendar page is the one people underestimate. It shows you the day as events, and then does the scheduling arithmetic on top of it. It takes your quadrant order and lays your day out as focus blocks, at the block length and long break cadence your timer uses, so the day is planned in the same unit it is counted in.

A task that needs three blocks gets three. The breaks are reserved and never filled with work, which is the whole point of a break. If you drop something into a specific slot by hand, that slot is fixed and everything else flows around it.

Somewhere in the afternoon the water reminder asks you a question. It is on by default, it only fires inside the working hours you set, and it waits for an answer instead of announcing a fact. One glass counts as 30 millilitres by default, because the smallest thing anyone would call a drink is the honest unit for a day of sipping. If you minimise the window it logs the glass and leaves you alone rather than pulling the full app over your work.

The Habits page sits next to all this with current streaks, personal bests and a check-in strip per habit. Nothing clever. Just the thing that makes you not want to break the chain.

Evening: the part that tells you what to change

Most productivity apps hand you charts and let you draw the conclusion. Analytics in DeepWork pairs every number with a plain language reading of it.

Focus over the last seven days, with a hint telling you what the seven days before that looked like. Tasks closed, with a total underneath. Focus streak, with the number of active days behind it. Completion rate over thirty days, next to how many tasks are still open and how many are overdue. Habit consistency. Journal words over twelve weeks.

Those readings are arithmetic over your own records, computed on your machine, so the same week always produces the same reading. You can check any of them by opening the records they came from.

Then the Journal. Dated entries with word counts, a weekly words chart, and one figure I did not expect to find useful: the correlation between your writing and your focus. More words on the days you worked more blocks is either a good sign or a warning, and it is more useful to know which.

The details you find by poking around

Feature lists are boring. These are the things that made me keep a copy installed.

Excel import that shows you what it will do before it does it. Tasks, then Import, accepts .xlsx, .xlsm and .csv, recognises the headers people actually write (Task, Due Date, Prio, Labels), validates every row, and writes nothing until you confirm the preview. Duplicate titles are labelled, and you choose whether to skip them. There is a download template with real dropdowns and an instructions sheet, if you want your spreadsheet to be valid before you start.

Export that tells you where the file went. Twenty four columns per task, quick ranges like Today and Last 7 days, an optional totals block, and UTF-8 with a BOM so accents and non Latin scripts survive Excel. It writes into your Downloads folder, shows you the full path, and never overwrites: the second export of the day becomes export-2026-09-13 (2).csv.

More than twenty keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+0 jump between pages. Ctrl+Shift+F is focus mode, which is the clock and nothing else. Space starts and pauses. With a task card focused, 1, 2 and 3 move it between To Do, In Progress and Done, the arrow keys walk it along the board, and Enter opens it for editing.

Editing from wherever you are reading. Every card that shows a task carries the way into the same task form: a pencil on a board card, a pencil on a Matrix quadrant, one on a Calendar rail card, and Edit at the top of the Matrix right click menu. You never have to go and find the page that owns the task.

A backup you can actually restore. Settings writes a single dated JSON file with your sessions, tasks, habits, journal and water records. Importing it overwrites what you have, after a confirmation, because it is a restore and not a merge.

Diagnostics for when something breaks. Settings then Logs and Diagnostics shows you the app’s own logs, opens the folder, and has a Copy diagnostics button that puts the last three hundred lines plus your environment on the clipboard. If you ever report a bug, that is the thing to paste.

Themes, fonts and no network. System, light and dark themes, two bundled typefaces, and no font CDN, so it looks like itself offline or behind a company proxy.

What it is not, and the trade you are making

I would rather you decide with the whole picture.

It does not sync. Each machine has its own database. Moving your work between two computers means exporting the JSON on one and importing it on the other. There is no backend, and nothing arrives on your other device by itself.

It is one person’s app. One developer, a public changelog, and issues on GitHub. There is no support team and no roadmap meeting.

The installers are not code signed. This is the one that makes people nervous, so here is exactly what happens. On Windows you will see “Windows protected your PC” from SmartScreen, and the UAC dialog will say Unknown publisher. On macOS, Gatekeeper will refuse the first launch with a message about not being able to verify the app. Both are the absence of a signature worth several hundred dollars a year, not a sign of a broken download. If a release publishes a SHA-256 checksum, compare it before installing.

The web build is the least private option of the three. Anything you do in a browser tab lives in that origin’s localStorage, and clearing site data erases it. If you want the real database, install the desktop app.

It is not a team tool. No sharing, no assignment, no comments, no collaboration. One person, one database, by design.

If any of those are deal breakers, that is a fair answer, and the web app is still there for you to try before deciding.

How to get it in the next five minutes

The fastest route is the browser. Open https://deepwork.rajatmalik.dev/, and if you like it, install it as an app from your browser’s menu. In Chrome or Edge that is the install icon in the address bar. In Safari 17 or newer it is File, then Add to Dock. Firefox cannot install web apps, so use the desktop build there.

The real thing is the desktop build, and it is on the releases page. The source, the changelog and every issue live in the same repository at github.com/malikrajat/deepwork.

• Windows 10 and newer, 64 bit or 32 bit: an NSIS .exe setup or an .msi.
• macOS: a .dmg, with separate builds for Intel and Apple Silicon.
• Linux: an .AppImage, a .deb or an .rpm.

There is also a page for it at https://deepwork.rajatmalik.dev.

Because nothing is signed, here is what gets you past it.

# Linux: make the AppImage runnable
chmod +x DeepWork_*.AppImage

# macOS 15 and later: clear the quarantine flag after the first refusal
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DeepWork.app

On Windows, choose More info, then Run anyway, only if you trust the source. On macOS, the old Control click trick no longer works on recent versions; open System Settings, Privacy and Security, Security, and use Open Anyway after the first attempt.

Then let the first launch ask you its three questions, answer them honestly, and start a block.

A ten minute tour, if you want the short version

If you install it and then wonder where to begin, do these in order. It is the fastest way to find out whether it fits how you work.

1. Press Ctrl+2 and add three tasks, starring the one you would do first if the day went well.
2. Press Ctrl+3 and drag those three into quadrants honestly, not optimistically.
3. Press Ctrl+4 and look at what your day becomes when it is laid out as blocks.
4. Go back to the Dashboard, press Space, and then press minimise. Watch what happens.
5. Let the block finish and ignore the alert for two minutes. Notice the colour has changed.
6. Press Ctrl+6 and read the hint under each number.
7. Open Settings and change one thing you dislike.

Seven steps, ten minutes, and by the end you will know whether the shape of this app matches the shape of your day. If it does not, uninstall it; there is no account to delete and nothing to cancel.

If something is missing, say so

This is the part where a one person app genuinely needs you.

It is on its sixth tagged release, and the changelog in the repository is longer than this article. A good number of those fixes came from using it daily and writing down what annoyed me. The ones that did not came from people telling me.

So if you try it and something is wrong, the most useful things to send are concrete. What you did, what you expected, what happened instead, and which page you were on. If it is a crash or something looks broken, use Settings, Logs and Diagnostics, Copy diagnostics, and paste that in. It saves an hour of guessing.

Feature requests are welcome too, and the honest answer is sometimes no. If it is a no, you will get a why.

The two places to put it:

• An issue at github.com/malikrajat/deepwork/issues
• An email to [email protected]

If you would rather just say it worked, that is also useful. Knowing which features people actually use is how the next version gets decided.

Have you ever abandoned a productivity app because it asked for an account on day one? I would like to know what pushed you off, because that list is the one I am trying to avoid.

Back to that tab

It is 2:47 in the afternoon and you have fourteen tabs open. One of them is DeepWork, because you installed it, and closing the tab does not matter any more.

The window is small, in the corner, over your editor. The ring is two thirds full. Your three tasks for today are on the board, one of them is in progress, and the fourth block is scheduled for after the break. The app is not asking you for anything.

When the block ends, it will ring, and it will keep ringing, and it will not stop until you decide you are done with it. That is the whole promise. The timer is the only thing that has to stop.

If you try it

Tell me how it went. Did the ten minute tour match how you actually work, or did the app get in your way? Leave a comment, and if you found a bug, the issue link above is the fastest route. I read everything.

Found this useful? If it saved you from another timer that forgets you the moment you close the tab, hit the clap button so more people find it. It genuinely helps a one person project more than it does a big one.

Want the next one? I write about the tools I build and the decisions behind them, roughly once a week. Follow me here on Medium, where I am @codewithrajat, or subscribe to the newsletter so you do not miss the next release.

Let us connect. Find me on LinkedIn or GitHub and tell me what your day actually looks like. And if you know someone whose focus timer lives in a tab they keep closing, send them this article.

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