Medium timers (10–45 minutes)
Press start for a full-screen 20-minute timer that counts down 20:00 and rings a loud alarm when it reaches zero. You can pause and resume it, reset it, and the countdown keeps running accurately even if you switch tabs or your screen dims. No sign-up, nothing to install.
Ready · 20-minute timer
Twenty minutes is a versatile, sustainable block. It is the upper bound of a refreshing power nap, the recommended cadence for resting your eyes from a screen, a complete short workout, and a focused study or work sprint for people who find the standard 25-minute Pomodoro slightly too long. It is also the interval many soups, sauces and grains need to simmer or cook through.
If you work at a screen, the most useful thing a twenty-minute timer can do for you is enforce the 20-20-20 rule, an eye-care guideline endorsed by optometrists worldwide: every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet (about six metres) away for twenty seconds. The point is that staring at a fixed near distance for long stretches keeps the focusing muscle inside your eye continuously contracted, which contributes to the dryness, blurring and ache of digital eye strain. Looking into the distance relaxes that muscle and gives it a genuine break, and twenty seconds is long enough for it to fully release. Setting a recurring twenty-minute timer is the simplest way to build the habit, because the strain creeps up so gradually that you never notice you are due for a break until your eyes already hurt.
Most browser timers drift, because they count by accumulating small ticks, and browsers deliberately slow those ticks down in background tabs to save battery. This one is different: the moment you press start it records the exact wall-clock time the countdown should end, and every frame it simply measures how long is left until that fixed end time. If you switch tabs, lock your phone, or the tab is throttled, the remaining time is recomputed from the real clock the instant you come back, so a 20-minute timer is still a 20 minutes timer rather than however long the throttled ticks happened to add up to. On phones the page asks for a screen wake lock while the countdown is running, where the browser allows it, so the display does not sleep mid-count. The alarm is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API, which means there is no audio file to download and the chime is ready the moment you start.
Need a different length? These are the timers people most often reach for alongside a 20-minute timer:
Browse the full set of countdown timers, or switch tools: the Pomodoro timer loops work and break intervals automatically, the online stopwatch counts up with laps, the alarm clock rings at a specific time of day, and the countdown maker counts down to a future date you can share or embed.