I got tired of Pomodoro lying to me, so I built a dual-budget desktop timer

Ursa — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:39:42 +0000

Classic Pomodoro has a hidden assumption: once the work timer starts, you should stay focused until it ends.

That sounds great in theory. In practice, it kept failing for me.

Sometimes I would get distracted in the middle of a focus session. Sometimes other people would interrupt me. The timer kept running anyway, and when those 25 minutes were over, I had no honest idea how much I had actually worked and how much of that time had been noise.

At that point, the timer stopped being helpful. It became performative.

So I built Ketchup — a compact desktop timer that keeps the Pomodoro spirit, but changes one rule that made all the difference for me.

Instead of forcing “work first, break later” as one rigid timeline, Ketchup treats work and break as two independent budgets inside the same cycle.

If your cycle is 25 + 5, then you still owe the cycle 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest — but you can switch between them whenever real life demands it.

Got interrupted 8 minutes into work? Switch to break.
Ready again after 2 minutes? Switch back to work.
Need another short pause later? Go for it.

The cycle only ends when both budgets reach zero.

That means the timer no longer pretends you worked for 25 uninterrupted minutes when you didn’t. It reflects what actually happened.

In a way, it feels closer to a chess clock than to a classic Pomodoro timer.

Why this model works better for me

The main problem I had with traditional Pomodoro wasn’t discipline. It was that the model assumed a level of uninterrupted focus that my real workdays rarely have.

A good productivity tool should survive interruptions, not break because of them.

This dual-budget approach helped me in a few ways:

I no longer “lose” work time to random interruptions.
Breaks are still deliberate, not accidental.
A cycle stays honest: work is work, rest is rest.
I can adapt in the moment without throwing away the structure entirely.

It feels less like failing a timer and more like using one.

What I built

Ketchup is a small cross-platform desktop app built with Tauri v2 + React.

A few things I wanted from it:

Free phase switching — move between Work and Break at any moment
Dual progress rings — both budgets stay visible, so the whole cycle is always readable at a glance
Preset and custom configurations — easy to change timing setups
Sound transitions using the Web Audio API
A compact desktop UI with a frameless window and smooth animations
Local-first behavior — no accounts, no cloud, no ceremony

I also intentionally kept the architecture simple: the timer state machine and UI logic live in the React frontend, while Rust is mostly there to host the Tauri side of the app.

Why Tauri

This project felt like a perfect fit for Tauri.

I wanted a desktop app that was:

lightweight
cross-platform
easy to ship
pleasant to build UI for

React gave me a fast way to iterate on the interaction model, and Tauri made it possible to package that into a native-feeling desktop app without dragging in the overhead of a heavier runtime.

For a tiny utility app, that combination feels really good.

The more interesting part wasn’t the code

Honestly, the most valuable part of building this project was not the implementation.

It was realizing that many productivity tools fail not because they are badly designed, but because they encode the wrong assumptions about attention.

The classic Pomodoro method assumes a clean separation:

focus
break
repeat

But real work is messy. Attention is messy. Interruptions are normal.

So instead of trying to force myself to behave like a perfect timer user, I changed the timer to better match reality.

That turned out to be much more useful.

What’s next

I’ve already published the first release, and I’m still polishing the project.

Things I’m especially interested in now:

feedback on the interaction model
UI/UX improvements
ideas for small but meaningful features
edge cases in timer behavior across platforms

If you’ve ever felt that Pomodoro is helpful in theory but too rigid in practice, I’d love to hear how you handle that.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/Rench321/ketchup-timer