Customise pomodoro durations on Mac

The 25/5 split is a fine default. It’s also a fine default that sometimes doesn’t match your work. Maybe your deep work needs 50 minutes to warm up. Maybe a 5-minute break is too long for shallow tasks and you’d rather take 3. The duration should bend to you, not the other way around.

Here’s how to set that up on a Mac.

Two paths

The native macOS way (Shortcuts + Clock)

You can build one Shortcut per duration — “Start 50-minute timer”, “Start 90-minute timer” — and assign each to a hotkey. Shortcuts.app supports timer creation, so the mechanics work.

The honest catch: every variant is a separate Shortcut. Switching focus length mid-week means editing the Shortcut or building a new one. There’s no notion of “this is a preset and that one is a preset” — just a growing folder of near-duplicates. And once a timer fires, you’re back to manually starting the break.

The Tempo way

Tempo treats focus length, short break, long break, and “sessions before long break” as a single preset you can save and switch between.

1. Open Settings > Presets.
2. Tempo ships with the common ones: 25/5, 50/10, and 90/20. Pick the closest to what you want.
3. Click + to create a new preset. Name it ("Morning deep work", "Email triage", whatever).
4. Set focus duration, short-break duration, long-break duration, and how many focus blocks before the long break kicks in.
5. Save. The preset is now in your menubar panel's picker — switch presets in one click, no settings trip required.

A few combinations worth trying: 45/15 for creative work that needs more reset time, 15/3 for shallow admin pomodoros when you’re rebuilding momentum after a slow morning, 52/17 which a 2014 DeskTime study suggested was the average pattern of their most productive users.

The point isn’t the number — it’s that switching is cheap. When the work changes, the preset changes with it, and your week’s history records which preset you ran. Over a month you start to see which lengths actually correspond to your best output.