Pulse is the small focus button that lives in the corner of every page. Start a session, navigate anywhere, and your timer keeps running. Here's why we built it and exactly how to use it.

Why we built Pulse

Most focus timers force a deal you don't want to make: leave them open on a dedicated screen, or lose track of your session. So you sit on a stopwatch page, watching numbers count down, and call it "studying."

That's not focus. That's babysitting.

Pulse is the opposite. You start a session and then go do your actual work — open a PDF, run a quiz, generate a mind map, jump to a flashcard deck. The timer follows you. The little pill in the top-left corner shows your remaining time, quietly, and that's it.

How to start a session

Tap the Pulse icon — it's the little waveform in the top-left of every page, or under the user menu (top-right) labelled "Pulse".
Pick Focus (default 50 minutes) or Break (default 10).
Hit Start.
Close the page. Go study. Generate a quiz. Read your outline. The pill keeps counting.

When the session ends, you get a toast notification and the minutes are credited to your streak. If you stop early, anything over a minute still counts.

The pill, explained

When idle, the pill is just a small waveform icon — barely there. Click it to open the full Pulse dashboard.

When a session is running, the pill expands slightly to show your live countdown — e.g. 23:14. Breaks show a ·br suffix so you don't confuse the two at a glance.

If even the idle pill feels like too much, you can hide it: Profile → Pulse → Floating Pulse button (toggle off). Pulse stays accessible from the top-right menu. When a session is actually running, the pill comes back briefly regardless of the toggle — so you can't accidentally forget you're on the clock.

The dashboard

Open Pulse and you get three things in one screen:

Stats strip — today's minutes against your daily goal, current streak in days, and the last 7 days total. No graphs you have to interpret. Three numbers.
Timer ring — your countdown, big enough to read across the room. The mode pill (Focus / Break) sits above it.
Calendar — a month grid shaded by minutes worked, so you can see your week of consistency at a glance. Tap a day to recall what you did.

Settings (daily goal, default block lengths) live behind the gear icon in the corner. We moved them out of the main view because you set them once and forget them.

Choosing your block length

The defaults — 50 minutes focus, 10 minutes break — are based on research into ultradian rhythms and what actually fits in a school or work day. They're not sacred. Tap the gear, change them. Some patterns to try:

Classic Pomodoro: 25 + 5
Deep work: 90 + 15
Triage mode (cramming): 45 + 5
Recovery (post-burnout): 30 + 10

Whatever you pick, the rule is the same: when the bell rings, actually take the break. The break is not the timer being wrong — it's the part that makes the next focus block possible.

Why "Pulse"

Focus is not a switch. It's a rhythm — periods of attention alternating with periods of rest, repeated long enough that the habit gets cheap. A pulse, not a binge.

The streak counter is there to track the rhythm, not to shame you for missing a day. If you break a streak, start a new one tomorrow. The graph forgets. So does Pulse.

A few tips

Label your session. That text field above Start ("What are you working on?") isn't decoration. Reviewing your recent sessions and seeing "Calculus Ch.3" beats seeing five identical "Focus" entries. It also nudges you to commit to one thing.
Don't start without a plan. Spend the 30 seconds before hitting Start deciding what counts as done. Open the file. Pick the chapter. Then start.
Use Break for actual rest. Standing up, water, looking at something more than 6 feet away. Not Twitter. Twitter is a focus block disguised as a break.

What's next

Pulse is intentionally minimal — three numbers, one timer, one calendar. We're not going to bolt on focus music players, ambient sound mixers, or productivity scores. There are apps that do that. We made Pulse so studying with QuizGenius feels like one continuous flow instead of a tab-juggling exercise.

Start a session. Go open a PDF. Come back tomorrow and see your streak go from 0 to 1.

Pulse: Stop Babysitting a Timer, Start Studying