Deep Work
50 minutes focus, 10 minutes short break, 30 minutes long break, every 2 sessions. Built for writing, design, and engineering work where 25 minutes is barely enough to warm up.
Tempo is a calm pomodoro timer for your Mac, with a Focus Score that watches your week. This guide covers focus sessions, breaks, the score, and every option in Settings.
Tempo lives in two places at once: a small timer icon in your menu bar, and a friendly main window with stats and controls. You can start a focus session from either, and from anywhere with a single key press.
A focus session in flight — the ring fills as the time ticks down, the dot row tracks where you are in the set.
The menu-bar icon (a small timer glyph) is Tempo's home base. While the
timer is idle, left-click it to open the main window;
right-click for a quick menu with Start Focus,
Open Tempo, and Quit Tempo. Once a session is running,
the menu bar shows the remaining time live — 24:31,
24:30, 24:29 — so you can glance at it without
bringing the window forward.
Click the big circular Play button in the middle of the window. Tempo immediately begins the focus phase of your active preset (25 minutes by default), kicks off the countdown, and starts pulsing the ring around the timer.
If you've enabled Auto-hide window when timer starts in Settings, the window slides away the moment you hit play — useful if you want to stay heads-down in your real work and only see Tempo's menu-bar countdown.
Whenever the main window is focused, Space toggles the timer
between play and pause. No clicking required — just tap space to start
the session, tap it again to pause when you have to step away, tap it a
third time to resume.
The menu-bar icon swaps to a cup on breaks and a pause glyph when the timer is paused — so even when the window's hidden, a glance at the menu bar tells you where you are in the rhythm.
Tempo follows the classic Pomodoro rhythm: a stretch of focused work, then a short break, then more work — with a longer break every few cycles to fully reset. Each preset gives you a different shape of that rhythm.
Tempo ships with the original Pomodoro durations selected out of the box. They're the right starting point for most people:
That gives you a two-hour cycle: four 25-minute focus blocks with short breaks between them, then a 15-minute reset. Repeat for as long as you've got.
Solid bars are focus phases; outlined bars are breaks. The long break replaces the 4th short break.
Tempo also ships with two alternative presets — pick whichever fits the kind of work you're doing today:
50 minutes focus, 10 minutes short break, 30 minutes long break, every 2 sessions. Built for writing, design, and engineering work where 25 minutes is barely enough to warm up.
15 minutes focus, 3 minutes short break, 10 minutes long break, every 4 sessions. Useful for inbox triage, code review, or anything where you'd rather pulse than sprint.
Swap presets from the preset picker on the main window, or from Settings → Timer → Active Preset. You can also build your own from scratch in Settings → Presets — see the Presets section below.
When a focus phase ends, Tempo doesn't just stop dead — it flows into the next phase based on two toggles in Settings → Timer:
Turn both on and Tempo runs the whole cycle hands-free until you stop it. Turn both off and every transition is a deliberate choice. Most people land somewhere in the middle, which is exactly where the defaults sit.
After every n focus sessions, Tempo replaces the next short break with a long break. The number of sessions and the length of the break are part of each preset:
The dot row beneath the timer shows where you are in the set — one dot lights up for each completed focus session. Once the row fills, the next break is the long one and the dots reset.
Long breaks are when Tempo really wants you to step away from the screen. If you flip on Break Blockout in Settings → General, Tempo throws a friendly full-screen overlay over every monitor for the duration of the break — gently enforcing the "actually go get water" part of the rhythm. It's dismissible the second you really need your screen back; nothing's ever held hostage.
In the stats row at the top of the main window, alongside Today, Focus-time, and Streak, there's a single number from 0 to 100: your Focus Score. A small "sparkle" icon appears next to it once you get above 60.
The score is Tempo's attempt to capture how the week's been going in one glance. It's deliberately not a leaderboard or a streak count — it's a weighted blend of three things that, together, tell the truth about your focus habits.
A blend of three signals — streak, consistency, and goal progress — collapsed into one weekly number.
Your current consecutive-day streak, capped at 7 days. One day in a row gets you ~14% of the streak component; a full week maxes it out. The cap is intentional — Tempo doesn't want you running a 150-day streak that's mostly fear of breaking it. A week is enough proof that the habit is real.
How many of the last 7 days had at least one focus session. This is the heaviest weighting because it's the single best predictor of real focus habits — turning up every day matters more than having one heroic day. Six of the last seven days active = 86% of the consistency component.
Your average daily progress toward your Daily Focus Goal over the last 7 days. If your goal is 2 hours and you average 90 minutes a day, that's 75% of the goal component. Anything past 100% of the goal is capped — overshooting one day doesn't earn extra credit toward another.
If you haven't set a Daily Focus Goal yet, Tempo uses a sensible default of 120 minutes (two hours of focus per day) so the score still works.
The number itself is just a number, but the colour tells you which band you're in:
The score is computed entirely on your Mac from the local sessions file (~/Library/Application Support/Tempo/sessions.json). No data is ever sent anywhere to compute it.
Below the stats row is a GitHub-style contribution grid — one square per day, coloured by how many focus minutes you logged. Days with no activity stay grey; light days get a faint tint; full days light up in the accent colour you've chosen in Themes. Hover any square to see the date and exact minutes.
The grid auto-fits the available width — narrow the window and it shows fewer weeks; widen it and you'll see more of your history. Each column is a week, top to bottom Monday → Sunday.
A week's focus at a glance — tall bars on heads-down days, faint bars on light days, empty columns on days off.
The Streak counter (in the stats row) is a strict consecutive-day count: one focus session per day keeps it alive. If you haven't done a focus session yet today, the count is "yesterday-based" — i.e. it shows the streak through yesterday, not zero. The moment you hit play today, the count rolls forward.
For a deeper drill-in, click History in the main window to open the full sessions sheet — every session you've ever completed, grouped by day, with the preset name and any task label you added.
Tempo is deliberately quiet by default. The only sounds you'll hear are short system chimes at the end of each phase — and even those can be turned off entirely.
Tempo uses two macOS system sounds, picked for tone rather than volume:
Both play at 80% volume. If your system volume is muted, Tempo respects that — it doesn't have an override.
Tempo also posts a macOS notification at the end of every phase, with a friendly title and body:
The first time Tempo runs, macOS will ask whether you want to allow notifications. Say yes — it's the only way the banners reach you when Tempo isn't the frontmost app. If you say no, you can always change your mind in System Settings → Notifications → Tempo.
The chimes can be muted independently of the notification banners — Settings → Sounds → Notification sounds turns just the audio off while keeping the banners on. Useful in shared workspaces.
Tempo can flip your Mac's Do Not Disturb on at the start of a focus session and off again when the session ends. It's the single best switch you can throw to keep Slack pings, iMessage banners, and email pop-ups from yanking your attention.
Turn it on in Settings → General → Focus Mode → Enable Do Not Disturb during focus. Default: off — Tempo doesn't touch your system DND unless you ask it to.
When enabled, here's what happens at each transition:
Behind the scenes, Tempo toggles macOS's Notification Center DND flags and politely restarts the Notification Center process so the change takes effect immediately. It does not activate a full system Focus Mode — it's purely the DND switch, so your custom Focus filters and allowed-people lists stay exactly as you've configured them.
Once a timer is running, three controls sit underneath it: a stop (×), the big play/pause button, and a skip (forward). Each one does exactly what you'd expect, but it's worth knowing what gets recorded and what doesn't.
Press the play/pause button (or Space) to freeze the
countdown at its current value. The phase doesn't change; the menu-bar
icon swaps to a pause glyph; nothing is recorded. Press it again to pick
up exactly where you left off — Tempo recalculates the end time from the
moment you resume, so leaving it paused for an hour is fine.
The forward (▶▶) button ends the current phase early and moves you to whatever's next — focus → break, break → focus, or focus → long break if this was your nth session. The completed-set dot row and your session count do advance, but a skipped focus phase doesn't count as a "completed focus session" — useful when you need to bail on a session but don't want to break the rhythm of the day.
The × button on the left tears down the whole rhythm: phase resets to idle, dot row clears, task label is wiped, time-remaining returns to zero. The next time you hit Play you'll start a fresh focus phase from the active preset. Use Stop when your day's over, or when you want to switch tasks completely.
If your Mac goes to sleep mid-session, Tempo handles it gracefully. On wake, it checks the original end time: if the phase would have ended during sleep, it fires the completion exactly as if you'd been awake; if there's time left, the countdown picks up at the right remaining value.
Tempo doesn't register a global system-wide hotkey by design — the menu
bar and Space-while-focused already give you instant access
without competing with whatever shortcut system you've layered on top
with Raycast, Alfred, or Shortcuts.
Open Settings with ⌘, or from the menu bar. Tempo's
preferences are split into seven tabs, each one small and focused.
Catch-all tab for the choices that don't fit anywhere else.
Controls for how the timer flows and which preset is active.
A list of every preset Tempo knows about. Built-ins (Pomodoro, Deep Work, Quick Task) are read-only — they live at the top, marked with a checkmark if active. Below them is your Custom section, which starts empty.
Click New Preset at the bottom to build one. Each preset has four numbers:
Right-click any custom preset for Edit / Delete. Deleting the active preset falls Tempo back to the standard Pomodoro automatically.
Five colour themes change the accent colour used across the whole app — the play button, the progress ring, the streak grid squares, the Focus Score pill. Each theme also picks complementary colours for short breaks and long breaks so the three phases stay visually distinct.
Tempo updates itself in place — no App Store. The Updates tab shows the current version, lets you toggle automatic checks, and gives you a manual Check now button. Updates are signed and delivered over HTTPS; you'll see a small banner in the main window when one is ready to install.
Shows the current state of your licence — Trial Active (with time remaining), Trial Expired, Licensed, or one of the recovery states (e.g. payment failed, device deactivated) — and gives you the right action for each one. While on trial you'll see a Purchase License button alongside an Activate field for entering a key you already own. Once activated, the tab shows your key, your renewal date if you're on Unlimited, and a Deactivate License link that frees up the slot so you can move Tempo to another Mac.
Version number, a tag-line reminder of what Tempo is, and a Show Welcome button that re-opens the post-install welcome flow if you want to revisit it.
Tempo is free to try for 24 hours — full access, every feature, no watermark, no nag screen. A small banner near the timer shows you the time remaining ("23h left", "4h left") so there are no surprises.
Past 24 hours, you'll need a licence to keep using Tempo. Buy it once for $9.99 and it's yours forever on this Mac — no subscription, no renewal, no annual fee. Or pick up Unlimited and you get Tempo plus every other General Software app for one monthly fee.
To activate, paste your key into Settings → License and click Activate. Tempo phones home to verify, then the tab flips to the "Licensed" view — that's it. If you ever need to move Tempo to a different Mac, hit Deactivate License first to free up the activation slot.
If Tempo can't reach the licence server (you're on a flight, your wifi's down), it keeps working — you've got a generous offline grace period. The only thing you can't do offline is activate a brand-new key.
The score is a 7-day rolling view, so one stellar day can't undo a quiet week instantly. The biggest single lever is consistency: turning up every day, even for a short session, is the fastest way to move the number. The streak component picks up after a few days; the goal component over the same 7-day window.
Yes — there's a task label field above the timer on the main window. Type anything (e.g. "draft Q3 plan") before or during a session; it's saved with the completed session and shows up in the History sheet alongside the date and duration.
Yes. The window closes; the timer keeps running in the menu bar. Left-
click the menu-bar icon any time to bring the window back. The only way
to truly stop Tempo is Quit Tempo from the menu bar's
right-click menu, or ⌘Q.
In a single JSON file at ~/Library/Application
Support/Tempo/sessions.json. Tempo writes it lazily (debounced 5
seconds after the last change) and atomically, so a crash mid-write
never corrupts your data. If you want to back it up to Dropbox /
iCloud, that's the file to grab.
Not directly inside Tempo — but macOS gives you two easy paths. Shortcuts.app can drive Tempo via "Open Tempo" + a keyboard shortcut on the Shortcut itself. Or, if you use Raycast / Alfred / Keyboard Maestro, point it at the menu item "Start Focus".
Tempo remembers the original end time, not the seconds-remaining counter. When the Mac wakes, it compares the current time against that end time: if it's still in the future, the countdown resumes at the right remaining value; if it's already past, the phase completes exactly as if you'd been awake — chime, banner, next phase queued.
The icon is a small clock-face glyph and can be hidden if your menu bar
is busy. Hold ⌘ and drag in the menu bar to reorder /
reveal icons, or temporarily quit a few menu-bar apps to make room. If
Tempo is running but you can't see it, you can still reach it via Spotlight:
⌘Space → "Tempo" → enter.
That's everything Tempo does.