Add Pomodoro Timer to Your Mac’s Taskbar Using This App
If you’re looking for ways to get a little more productive, then you can start with the Pomodoro Technique. A technique developed in the early 90s by developer Francesco Cirillo involves breaking up large tasks into short time intervals. Cirillo called these intervals “Tomatoes,” in part because he calculated them with a kitchen timer that looked like a tomato.
Think of short intervals as a sprint. Instead of trying to tackle this gigantic marathon-level challenge in one sitting, you instead break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Working in small parts helps prevent burnout and can ultimately speed up a task, even if you take breaks.
You can tweak the technique that suits you best, but the general idea here is to work for 25 minutes and then take a five minute break. After four sets, you will take one longer break of 15-30 minutes. After the mega break, you start the whole process all over again.
This can be a really useful technique for long-running tasks, but it has one distinct disadvantage: you need a timer.
Pomo Timer is a Mac app that adds a tomato timer to the top of your Mac’s toolbar. With it, you can track how long you have been working or stopped and track how many sprints you have completed for the task as a whole. In the paid version, you can also track them on a graph.
While you can definitely accomplish this technique using a timer on your phone or any other clock you may have, having it on your desktop can make tracking sprints and breaks a little easier and can help you avoid it: “I’ll just check Facebook for a few minutes … ”when you start and stop the timer on your smartphone.
And, of course, it looks like an old-school tomato timer.