The Pomodoro Technique is a well known and widely used way of training your mind to focus on the task at hand. Lately, I’m using it more and more as a way of taking better breaks. Without a timer, I find myself continuing to work on a problem for far too long without stepping away to recalibrate my thinking. When stuck in gear, I spin my wheels rather than reapproaching a problem such as how to update an Eloquent query or change how to calculate metrics in an array.
At times, coding is about building a known structure but many times critical thinking is essential to figuring out that annoying bug your seeing. Breaks are important for good habits!
The goal is to find just the right timer. The criteria is:
- All the standard features must be there with adjustable intervals, goals for the day, so on.
- Organization of the timers with the ability to add names or categorize them.
- Available on multiple devices, mostly iOS and Mac but Windows would be helpful.
- Team availability and pricing are less important but definitely factor in.
- More on the nice to have but syncing between devices.
- Also nice to have is a sync to other services, Harvest or other time tracking apps.
Currently, I’ve been using the BeFocused app for iPhone and Pomodoro+ for Mac in my daily habits and both have their merits but I’m not quite satisfied, which is what prompted this search. The first update will be on these 2 and an overview of all the timers found.