A replacement for donothingfor2minutes.com

A timer that resets the moment you touch the mouse, the keyboard, or the trackpad. Sit still for two minutes and watch the tide come in. If you fidget, it goes back to zero and you start again.

Where it came from

For years there was donothingfor2minutes.com: a two-minute countdown over footage of surf, with one rule — don’t touch anything. Move the cursor, press a key, and the clock snapped back to 02:00. It was the most effective two minutes on the internet precisely because it asked for nothing except that you stop.

Calm acquired it, and it went away. I had used it for years and missed it enough to build it again.

What it is not

This is not a meditation app, and it is not trying to replace one. There is no course, no streak to protect, no account, and nothing to buy. It is a personal button for slowing down: I open the tab in the middle of a working day, sit still for two minutes, and go back to work.

If you were looking for the original site, or for something to do the same job, this is that — and nothing more than that.

How it works

• Pick 2, 5, 10 or 20 minutes — or type any length as minutes and seconds — and press Begin.
• Any mouse movement, click, keypress, scroll or touch resets the clock — and so does leaving the page. Switch tabs, or click into another window, and the session ends. Doing nothing means doing nothing else.
• The seascape is drawn by code rather than filmed. The sky runs from sunset to night over the course of a session.
• The tide rises as time passes and swallows the numerals from below; the submerged part bends as though seen through moving water. That is the progress bar.
• Surf is synthesized in the browser — filtered noise shaped into swells — so there is not a single audio file to download. It is off until you ask for it.

Your sessions stay on your machine

Finished sessions are written to IndexedDB in your own browser. There is no server, no account, no analytics, and nothing is ever sent anywhere — the site is a folder of static files. That local history draws the stats screen, and as your total stillness adds up the scene gains detail: stars, then moonlight, then bioluminescence in the breaking waves, then the Milky Way.

Clear your browser data and it is gone, because it never existed anywhere else.