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Fifty-two minutes of work and seventeen away from it, which is the longer answer to the same question the pomodoro asks. The oddly specific numbers are why people remember the ratio, and they came out of a productivity app looking at its own usage logs rather than out of any study, so the useful part is the shape rather than the arithmetic: a long block with a real break after it. Fifty-three would not ruin anything.
It suits work that takes a while to get into: writing, code, drawing, anything where twenty-five minutes is spent reloading context. If you have ever resented a pomodoro for ringing exactly when you got going, this is the ratio to try.
The tip is about the seventeen minutes, which is long enough to be a real break and long enough to lose. Decide before you start whether it is a walk, food or nothing at all, because a break with no plan becomes a phone, and a break spent on a phone does not restore attention; it spends more of it.
Start it with the button or the space bar, and use fullscreen if the number needs to be visible from a distance.
For work with a long warm-up, usually. For work you dread starting, usually not, because a short block is easier to agree to. Most people end up using both, depending on the task.
From a productivity app's own usage data rather than from a theory or a trial. That is why they are so specific, and also why they are worth treating as a starting ratio rather than a finding.
Open the seventeen minute countdown when you stand up, or add ?t=17m to the address on any page here. The break is the part that decides whether the next block works.
The ending itself does not move: the moment the block finishes is stored and compared against the clock, so the remaining time is right the instant you look. What a hidden tab delays is the noticing. After the first five minutes Chrome runs a background tab's timers only once a minute, which can hold back the tab title and the alarm by that much. The button beside the sound control opens a small window that stays above your other windows, and because that window is never hidden, the count and the alarm both stay on the second.