Suraj Giri – The Blog Timer

Background

I'm a web developer by trade and a productivity researcher by obsession. My background is in frontend systems and web performance — I've spent most of my professional career building fast, well-instrumented interfaces. My academic background is in cognitive psychology, with undergraduate research focused on attention and time perception. Those two things converged into The Blog Timer.

I have used the Pomodoro Technique daily since 2014. I keep a paper journal of session quality each quarter. Most of the editorial intuition on this site — what's worth a guide, what's overhyped, what the actual research says versus what Twitter says it says — comes from that practice.

Why I Built The Blog Timer

In short: a browser timer drifted on me while I was reducing a sauce, and dinner was ruined. The longer version is on the about page. The condensed version: most browser-based timers count down using setInterval, which browsers throttle aggressively in background tabs. The result is a timer that quietly lies to you. I built The Blog Timer's engine around stored end-timestamps so this class of bug cannot occur. The full testing protocol is on the methodology page.

From there, the project expanded into a 220+ preset library covering Pomodoro work blocks, Tabata intervals, NASA-grade nap durations, and a long tail of cooking, study, and meditation timings. Every preset is anchored either to a primary research source (see /sources/) or to a documented user request — never to fill out an SEO grid.

Areas of Expertise

Web performance & browser timing APIs. performance.now(), requestAnimationFrame, the Page Visibility API, autoplay policies, background-tab throttling, service workers. Hands-on for ~10 years.
Productivity protocols. Pomodoro (Cirillo 2006), deep work (Newport 2016), deliberate practice (Ericsson 1993), ultradian rhythms (Kleitman 1963, Levitin 2014). Daily user since 2014; reads the underlying papers, not just the popular write-ups.
Cognitive psychology of attention. Undergraduate research foundation; ongoing reading of Posner, Kahneman, Killingsworth, Mark, and Leroy. Comfortable distinguishing what the research says from what self-help books say it says.
Sleep science (intermediate). Familiar with the Mednick / Hayashi / Brooks-Lack literature on short-duration naps; happy to be corrected by formally credentialed sleep scientists, and actively recruiting one as an editorial advisor.
HIIT and interval-training programming (intermediate). Have read the Tabata 1996 original, Gibala's review work, and Buchheit & Laursen's HIIT programming framework. Not a credentialed coach.

Where my expertise is intermediate or thin (sleep, exercise, cooking), I default to citing the strongest primary sources I can find and clearly flagging open questions. That's the only honest move.

Contact

Email: suraj@theblogtimer.com — for corrections, citation suggestions, contributor pitches, and methodology questions. I read everything; I respond within 72 hours.
Corrections: see the editorial policy for the formal corrections process. Confirmed corrections get a dated note in the changelog.
Press / interview / citation requests: same email. Happy to talk about timer accuracy, browser-timing internals, or the productivity research literature.

Editorial Standards I Hold Myself To

Briefly — the full version lives on the editorial policy:

Every empirical claim links to a primary source. No "studies show" without a study.
Where I'm not credentialed, I say so, and I cite people who are.
Corrections are public, dated, and logged. Silent rewrites are not acceptable.
AI is a tool I use for outlining and language polish. It is not allowed to generate citations or empirical claims; every fact must be verified by me.
No paid placements. No affiliate links (currently). No newsletter dark patterns.

Recent Guides Published

A rolling selection of guides I have authored or substantially edited recently. (This list will be replaced by an auto-generated query once the byline is wired into the guide custom post type.)