Why I Built PomoMind: A Pomodoro Timer Designed Around Meditation
When treatment ended, the anxiety began
In 2024, I was diagnosed with cancer.
What followed was about two years of hospital stays, treatment, and follow-up checkups. When my treatment reached a stable point and I was finally able to go back to work, I honestly thought I could just return to my old life. I'd eat out at the places I couldn't during my hospital stay, get to the work I'd been putting off, slowly piece my daily routine back together. That was supposed to be the phase I was entering.
But it wasn't only my daily routine that came back.
No matter what I was doing, a corner of my mind kept asking, "What if it comes back? What if I end up right back there?" Writing code, eating a meal, lying in bed trying to sleep — the anxiety would surface in any quiet moment. The sense that death was somewhere nearby never fully left.
I wanted to focus on my work. I couldn't. And then I'd get anxious about not being able to focus. Caught in that loop, I knew I had to change something.
I started with walks, and ended up at meditation
The first thing I tried was a morning walk.
Before starting the day's work, I'd get up early and walk through a park near my home. It was the kind of "good for your mental health" habit you hear about everywhere, and I just gave it a try. The first few days felt good. The morning air was clear, and moving my body took the edge off a little.
But as I kept it up, I noticed something. Even while I was walking, the anxiety just kept circling around in my head. My body was moving, but my mind was standing still, going around the same place over and over. Eventually I lost the motivation to walk at all, and felt let down again — another habit I couldn't stick with.
The turning point was switching from walking to meditation.
The park I went to has a small pond, with a modest waterfall feeding into it. There's a bench nearby, and in the early morning it's almost empty. I'd sit there, close my eyes, and just bring my attention to my breathing. The sound of water flowing into the pond, the first birds of the morning, the rustle of the trees — all of it would come to me on its own.
When I was starting out, I tried various guided meditation videos on YouTube. One piece of advice I came across there ended up mattering a lot to me: when anxiety comes up, don't try to make it go away — just observe it.
Until then, whenever anxiety surfaced, I'd consciously try to suppress it: calm down, calm down. But the harder I tried to push it away, the more its presence grew.
So I tried what I'd been taught, and simply accepted it: "There's anxiety here." And strangely, that alone let it settle on its own. Don't fight it. Don't hold it down. Just focus on the self that exists right here, right now.
My focus didn't come back — the way I used it changed
After meditation had been a habit for a while, I noticed a change in myself during work.
When I work on development at home, there are naturally times when fatigue sets in. My focus runs out, and I reach a moment where I read code without any of it registering. Until then, my only options in those moments were to go make a coffee or open up social media to take my mind off things.
But now I had another option: meditation.
I'd stay in my chair, close my eyes for just five minutes, and concentrate on my breathing. That alone cleared my head. Doing five minutes of meditation became a habit — an easy way to recover my focus between stretches of work.
On top of that, because meditation lets me notice "the self that exists right here, right now," I find I have more room to breathe even when I'm stuck on a deadline or a stubborn bug.
Why I argue for active rest
This is where the story connects to building PomoMind.
I'd been a longtime user of the Pomodoro Technique in my work. Focus for 25 minutes, rest for 5. It's simple, but it pairs remarkably well with development work.
Still, after using Pomodoro for a long time, there was one thing that always nagged at me: the five-minute break wasn't a break at all.
The moment the break signal went off, what I'd actually do was open YouTube, scroll social media, make the rounds of news sites. I treated it as "time I'm allowed to not work" — passive rest, in other words. Information kept pouring in, the content kept stimulating my brain, and the five minutes vanished in an instant.
And when the next 25 minutes began, my head wasn't rested. It was more tired than before.
After I brought meditation into my life, I tried replacing that five-minute break with it. The result was dramatic. Five minutes that end in scrolling and five minutes that end in meditation were two completely different things.
This is the idea at the root of PomoMind: a break doesn't have to be time you let wash over you — it can be time you actively reset. Instead of pouring information in, you stop the flow of information once. That alone changes the quality of the next 25 minutes.
I call this "active reset."
What I put into PomoMind.io
PomoMind is a web app that combines a Pomodoro timer with meditation.
A 25-minute focus session, and a 5-minute break with guided meditation. That's basically it. But this design — making the break active — is a point that most existing Pomodoro apps overlook, or so I believe.
I also wanted to recreate, as much as I could within a web app, what I experienced beside that small waterfall and pond in the park. Reproducing it exactly is impossible, but I wanted to at least get close to the atmosphere.
So I added a feature to play ambient sound (simple noise, rain, and other natural sounds). The goal is to get a little closer to the feeling of "meditating in nature" even while you're sitting at your desk at home. For people who can't focus in a too-quiet room, it also works as noise masking.
I obsessed over a simple UI for the same reason — so it wouldn't get in the way of meditation. The timer screen is minimal, the settings live deep out of sight, and only what you need is in view. The app itself must never become a new source of noise when you're trying to focus. That was the guiding principle of the design.
The road to building PomoMind.io
I'd decided from the start to build it with React, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript. But until I committed to this app, Python was my main language and I only knew a tiny bit of HTML and CSS, so I studied from scratch.
Getting the timer built and running wasn't all that hard. But the design was, frankly, ugly, and I'd put buttons in hard-to-use places when switching to a mobile screen — there were plenty of problems like that.
Luckily, over the course of my illness, AI had advanced to the point where it could support coding. Now it helps me with both development and design, and that's how I've been able to implement the features I wanted to build.
Finally
I'm still in follow-up care, and the anxiety hasn't completely disappeared. It's probably something I'll live with from here on.
Even so, a way of working that combines meditation and Pomodoro has become a concrete method for getting through my days.
If you're someone who's anxious about not being able to focus, or who gets pulled into the social media vortex every time you take a break, I'd love for you to try PomoMind once.
Focus for 25 minutes, and close your eyes for just five.
That alone might be enough to get something moving, even just a little.