Pomodoro On Os X

Pomodoro

If you haven’t ever used the pomodoro technique then you are missing out. It is a great way to stay focused on one task at a time. It is also a good way to get yourself moving regularly. There is just one thing I don’t like about it. In order to have a good timer you usually have to have something that bothers your neighbor at work. For a while I was using my phone timer which worked okay, but I’m pretty sure my work mates hated me.

Solution

To solve this problem I used a *nix utility called at and an OSX utility called osascript. If you haven’t used it the at command schedules a command to execute sometime in the future. The osascript is a hook for shell scripts into AppleScripts. Putting those two things together I came up with this.

at now + 25 minutes <<< "osascript -e 'tell app \"System Events\" to display dialog \"Take A Break Pomodoro :)\"'"

This is a command that you can put into a script and run to set up a pomodoro timer that will pop up 25 minutes later.

Next steps

The next steps would be having a hook so then when you hit okay it starts up a 5 min timer that has another pop up. That next pop up should set another timer for 25 minutes and then maybe I will never forget to set up my next pomodoro timer.