Why 50 and 10
No study found this ratio. It comes from the timetable: many US colleges run Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes as 50-minute periods with a 10-minute gap to get to the next room. The University of Iowa's standard blocks, for example, are 50-minute classes with a 10-minute pass interval (UI Registrar). If you've sat through years of those, 50 minutes is a length your attention already knows.
It suits work that takes a while to load back into your head: a problem set where you need the whole question in view, an essay where the first ten minutes are rereading what you wrote yesterday. A 25-minute block spends a big share of itself on that warm-up. A 50-minute block spends the same warm-up once and keeps going.
What 50 minutes looks like
This is the length that made Pomo change how it lays out the Grid. With a fixed number of columns, 50 minutes used to come out as six rows of eight and a seventh row of two, which looked like two squares had fallen off. Now each length gets the block that fits it best, so 30, 35, 40, 45 and 50 minutes are all five rows deep and grow one column at a time.
A four-hour study block at 50/10
Set the long break to 10 as well and every break is the same length. From 1:00 to 5:00 pm:
| Phase | From | To | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | 1:00 pm | 1:50 pm | 50 min |
| Short break | 1:50 pm | 2:00 pm | 10 min |
| Focus | 2:00 pm | 2:50 pm | 50 min |
| Short break | 2:50 pm | 3:00 pm | 10 min |
| Focus | 3:00 pm | 3:50 pm | 50 min |
| Short break | 3:50 pm | 4:00 pm | 10 min |
| Focus | 4:00 pm | 4:50 pm | 50 min |
That's 25 more minutes of focus than seven rounds of 25/5 fit into the same afternoon (200 against 175), with ten fewer minutes of breaks. Whether that's better depends on whether you're still getting anything done in minute 45. If you aren't, the extra focus is only on paper.
Setting it up in the app
In Pomo, 50 is one of the three presets under the face, so a single tap arms a 50-minute focus. To make it your default, open Settings, then Session, and set Focus to 50 and Short break to 10. The long break has its own stepper (5 to 60 minutes) and the number of sessions before it has another (2 to 8); set the long break to 10 if you want every break the same.
By the Pomo team