The Third Time Method
Work for as long as you like. Then earn a break worth up to a third of the time you just put in — and whatever you don't spend carries over to the next one.
That's the whole method. It comes from Ben Finn, who wrote it up on LessWrong in 2022. This page is a short explainer, and a note on the timer I built to run it.
How it works
Start working. Stop when you want to — there's no preset interval, no bell to fight.
Take the time you just worked and keep a third of it as a break. Half an hour of focus earns ten minutes; a full hour earns twenty. A third is the default; prefer a different fraction, use it.
Don't feel you have to spend the whole break. Leftover minutes bank for later, so a long stint can fund a longer rest further down the day. The one rule: break time is earned by working, never taken before the work is done.
Then resume, and go again.
Why not just Pomodoro?
Pomodoro fixes the clock — twenty-five minutes on, five off, the alarm cutting in whether or not you're mid-thought. For some people the rigidity is the point: a forced stop before you spiral on something stuck.
Third Time fixes the ratio instead of the clock. Stints stretch or shrink to match your attention that day, and the break scales to whatever you actually worked. Nothing interrupts a good run at an arbitrary number. You trade the external bell for a little judgement about when to stop.
Neither is correct — they optimise for different things. If fixed intervals have always felt slightly wrong to you, this is probably why.
Where Divvy Time comes in
You don't need an app for Third Time. A kitchen timer and a scrap of paper will run it.
The only friction is the arithmetic — dividing each stint, tracking what's in the bank, remembering what you've earned across a long day. That's the part that gets dropped first.
Divvy Time keeps it for you. A work timer feeds a break bank at a ratio you choose, anywhere from a half down to a sixth. Sessions are recorded, so you can see whether the breaks you took matched the ones you earned. It's one implementation of the method, not the method itself — but if the counting is what's been stopping you, it's handled.
Questions
- What is the Third Time method?
- A focus technique: work as long as you want, then take a break worth up to a third of the time you just worked, with any unused break time carried forward to the next break.
- How is it different from Pomodoro?
- Pomodoro sets fixed work and break lengths. Third Time fixes only the ratio between them, so work stints can be any length and breaks scale to match what you did.
- Do I need an app to use it?
- No. Any timer works, and you can track the maths on paper. An app simply removes the bookkeeping.
- Is there an app for the Third Time method?
- Yes — Divvy Time, on iOS, implements it with a configurable work-to-break ratio and session history. See it on the App Store.
Original method: Ben Finn, Third Time: a better way to work , LessWrong (2022).