5 Minute Timer

Five minutes is the break people take without measuring it

Almost nobody puts a clock on a short break, which is exactly why a short break stops being short. The coffee gets poured, a message arrives, and the five minutes you meant to take have quietly turned into twenty. Putting the number on screen changes very little about the break itself and almost everything about when it ends.

• The coffee or tea break that you want to end on its own
• Two rounds of two minutes at the bathroom sink, with a little left over
• A soft boiled egg, where a minute either way is the whole difference
• Standing up to stretch once an hour during a long stretch at a desk
• A plank or a short circuit where the count matters more than the clock
• One surface, one drawer, as much tidying as fits before the alarm
• Letting a face mask, a tea bag or a pan of pasta water have exactly its time
• Sitting still and breathing, when stopping is the entire point

The egg, and other jobs where five minutes is the recipe

A soft boiled egg is the classic five minute job, and it is also the one where guessing shows on the plate. Egg size, how cold it was, how hard the water is boiling: all of it moves the result, so keep your own recipe as the authority and let this page hold the number steady. The same applies to a tea bag you do not want to forget, a pan of rice standing off the heat, or a dough resting before the next fold.

Start, and what Reset gives you back

Press Start and the countdown runs with nothing else to touch. Pause holds it exactly where it is when someone walks in, and the same button picks it up again. Reset is the one worth knowing on a page like this one: it puts five minutes back into the fields rather than clearing them to zero, so a second round is two presses away and never needs retyping.

Why it is still right when you get back to the desk

A browser deliberately slows down the timers in a tab you are not looking at, which is enough to make a counter that adds up one second at a time fall behind. This page never counts seconds that way. Pressing Start writes down the clock time your five minutes end at, and every repaint of the digits simply measures the distance to that moment. Walk to the kitchen, answer a message, bury the tab behind a spreadsheet: the number waiting for you is the real one.

A short alarm, or silence if the room is quiet

The sound at zero is three repeats of a two-tone signal, about two and a half seconds of sound in total, built in the browser rather than fetched as a file. Five minutes usually means you are within earshot, so it has no reason to be loud or long. The speaker button switches it off before you begin, and the large message on screen turns up either way. The fullscreen button blows the digits up to fill the display, which is the version you want when the device is propped on a shelf on the other side of the room.

If five minutes turns out to be the wrong size

Nothing on this page is locked to five minutes. Type any length into the fields, tap a quick chip, or move to a page that opens at the length you actually wanted: