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Introducing Focusr

One aspect of time management that is critical to success is finding a way to focus on tasks. For many people, myself included, it is a pretty serious battle that takes tons of practice and creative techniques for fooling yourself to stick to the task at hand. One such technique is the Pomodoro Technique. I haven't read the book or would consider myself an expert by any stretch, but the basic idea seems simple enough to run with it despite formal training.

In a nutshell, you give yourself 25 minutes to complete a task and then take a short 5 minute break before moving onto the next task. From what I understand, the book emphasizes using an egg timer that is visible to make the whole process convenient. Seeing as I'm a programmer and there are multitude of ways built into my desktop to get my attention, it seemed like a good opportunity to create a simple tool.

The result is Focusr. This is really simple timer that helps to complete Pomodoro like cycles. You say you want to start a task, it starts the 25 minute timer, lets you know when the times up and does the same for the break. Rinse and repeat. It is super simple and surprisingly effective.

You can grab it from the web or install it with easy_install or pip. It uses libnotify's

notify-send

command to do the actual notification. Also, I created a simple Emacs function so I could start it easily.
(defun pomo ( ) "Start a pomodoro task 25 minutes working and 5 off" (interactive) (setq msg (read-string "What do you want to work on? ")) (setq cmd (concat "focusr " msg)) (comint-simple-send (make-comint "pomodoro-task" "bash") cmd))

While I'm sure buying the book could be helpful, it seems more helpful to understand what Pomodoro is actually doing. For myself, it presents a attainable period of time focus on a task. I've read over and over again that one key to better productivity is breaking large tasks into smaller tasks. This is easier said than done though. By taking on the day in 25 minute chunks you're forced to consider how you can break up tasks such that you finish a task with in the time limit. In addition to getting better practice breaking up tasks, you also are exercising your estimation skills and getting a better understanding of how much work you can really do.Like I said before, the concepts are really simple with or without formal training.

For myself, I also appreciate the obvious openness of the system. Becoming more productive is partly effectively utilizing systems while always evolving your techniques. As a person you have an innate ability to hack around your own efforts. I think this technique is simple enough that it can be used many different ways to help keep your mind guessing, which in turn helps to truly learn how to get more focus.