Nova Focus

Deep work timer

Timer

1:30:00

Ends with a chime

AmbientNova Sounds · plays here, under the timer

Open in Spotify to follow the playlist. Not logged in? The player plays 30-second previews.

Nova Focus Plus: Nova Sounds' full catalogue inside the timer, no Spotify needed. Coming soon. Join the waitlist

Ambient

More sounds: pink, white and green noise

The short version

Why 90 minutes, with brown noise

What it is: Cal Newport defines deep work as focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. This timer gives you a 90-minute block and a 15-minute break, with brown noise or ambient music to cover the room. Plan one hard outcome per block and protect it.

Long, demanding work takes time to get into, so a 90-minute block with a 15-minute break gives you more time inside the problem. The 90-minute length is a convenient convention, not a biological rule; use 50/10 if 90 is too long today.

Open the 90 minute timer page About brown noise

What to play

Nova Sounds playlists on Spotify. The first one is also under the timer above.

  • First pick · about 28 min

    Ambient

    Tagged Deep Focus: slow, instrumental pieces with drones, piano and nature textures and no sudden changes, so they hold a mood for a long block without asking for attention.

    Open in Spotify

  • Also good · about 35 min

    Noise

    When any music is too much: brown, pink and white noise.

    Open in Spotify

Plan a deep work session

  1. Book it. Put one or two blocks in your calendar, ideally at the same time each day.
  2. Name the outcome. Not 'work on the report' but 'draft section 3'.
  3. Remove the exits. Close chat and email, silence notifications, put the phone in another room. Even a notification you do not answer can disrupt attention (Stothart et al. 2015).
  4. Start the timer and the sound. Brown noise for masking voices, the Ambient playlist if silence feels heavy.
  5. Take the whole break. Longer breaks tend to help more than very short ones after demanding work (Albulescu et al. 2022).
  6. Stop at two blocks unless it is going unusually well. Write the next step before you close the laptop.

90 minutes or less?

The 90-minute idea comes from Kleitman's basic rest-activity cycle, first described in sleep. Evidence for a fixed 90-minute cycle during the waking day is weak, so pick the length you can sustain. 50/10 and 52/17 are good alternatives.

What the research says

Evidence notes: the deep work definition is Newport's own. Notifications alone disrupted performance on an attention task in a lab study (Stothart, Mitchum & Yehnert 2015). A meta-analysis of micro-breaks found small effects on vigor and fatigue and suggested demanding tasks may need breaks longer than 10 minutes (Albulescu et al. 2022).

Related

All activities

Questions

About focus for deep work. Missing something? Write to [email protected].

Try 50 to 90 minutes. Start with one 50-minute block, then extend as it gets easier.

Something you stop noticing: brown noise, rain, or slow instrumental ambient music at low volume. For language-heavy work, silence is often best.

Deep work is about what you work on and how you protect it; Pomodoro is a timing method. You can do deep work in 25-minute Pomodoros, but most people prefer longer blocks such as 50/10 or 90 minutes with a 15-minute break.

Sources

  1. Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (author's post)
  2. Stothart, Mitchum & Yehnert (2015), The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification (abstract)
  3. Albulescu et al. (2022), Give me a break! A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks, PLOS ONE
  4. Basic rest–activity cycle (Wikipedia)