Writing sprint timer

How to run a sprint

1. Pick a length. 25 minutes is a common default; 10 or 15 is a good warm-up.
2. Add a word target if you want one. The quiet bar under the clock fills towards it.
3. Press Start and write. Do not go back to fix things; the only job is to add words.
4. When the clock runs out you get the words added, your pace, and the sprint goes into today's log.

Hide the count if watching the number makes you write for the number. Focus mode hides everything but the page and a small clock; Esc brings the rest back. Typewriter scrolling keeps the line you are writing near the middle of the screen instead of at the bottom edge. Sound at the end plays a short chime, made in your browser, when time is up.

How words are counted

The draft is counted with the same routine as the word counter: a word is a run of characters between spaces, line breaks or em dashes that contains at least one letter or digit. don't and well-known are one word each; one—two is two.

• Words added is the count now minus the count when you pressed Start. It is a net figure: delete a sentence and it drops.
• Pasted words are counted from the pasted text at the moment you paste, and shown separately.
• Words per minute is words added, less pasted words, divided by minutes of writing time. Paused time does not count. Nothing is shown in the first ten seconds.

The clock is worked out from the moment you pressed Start, not by counting ticks, so reloading the page, a laptop going to sleep or a tab in the background does not change it. If time runs out while the page is closed, the sprint is logged with the words that were in the draft when you come back.

Words from one sprint

What a sprint produces at different paces, rounded to the nearest ten. The paces are illustrative, not research figures: planned drafting often runs at 20 to 40 words a minute, careful or unplanned writing at 10 or less. Your log gives your own figure.

Days, streaks and the log

Each finished sprint is filed under the day it started, in your local time, and that day is fixed when the sprint is logged. A sprint from 23:50 to 00:15 counts for the first day, and flying to another time zone does not move old sprints. Your streak is the number of days in a row with at least one sprint; it stays alive until midnight, so a morning with no sprint yet does not reset it.

The log keeps your last 1,000 sprints. It lives in this browser only: another browser or device has its own, and clearing site data or pressing Delete all local data removes it.

From sprints to a finished draft

Sprints answer "how much can I write in a sitting"; a project needs "how much a day until the deadline". Once you have logged a few, the pacing box above turns your average pace into sprints a day. For a plan with rest days and milestone dates, use the writing goal calculator. To check the length of a finished piece in pages, try words to pages, and to see how long it takes to read, the reading time calculator.

Privacy

The draft, the sprint in progress, the log and your settings are kept in your browser's local storage on this device. None of it is sent anywhere; there is no account and no server copy. That also means there is no backup: download the text when you finish a session you care about. The privacy page lists exactly what is stored.