Pomodoro Method Follow Up

Pomodoro Technique

I’ve blogged about it before. Recently I dusted off my old method and tried to implement it. I found that there were some rather strange problems with my old method and MacOS. So I wanted to help some people.

The scripts

We have a few scripts. We have a delayed_mac script. This script just takes a command and a time in mins. It executes the command that many mins later. Next we have a take_a_break script. It sets a timer a timer for 5 or 15 mins later depending on your choice. It will run the pomondoro script after time is up. Next we have a pomodoro script. It asks you what your task is and then sets sets up to run the break script 25 mins later. All of this is written to a file which is gets rolled up with a timestamp. The scripts use atrun to schedule the tasks.

Upgrades

Finally I added a new feature. The scripts now play an alarm. This way I know when it is time to get back to work. You can see the script here

Gotcha!!

One problem I had with the script was it would silently fail. Mac recently updated it’s plist so that they are binary. I noticed the change when I moved from Mojave to Catalina. By default the at run plist located at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.atrun.plist is turned off. Before you could modify the file by turning off system integrity process. But with the new binary I couldn’t even get that to work. In the end I had to do two things. First you have to enable the atrun background process overriding the config. You can simply run this command.

launchctl load -Fw /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.atrun.plist

Next you have to update the Security and Privacy settings in System Settings. In particular you have to give atrun and your terminal program full disk access.