Pomodoro

I keep hearing about friends using The Pomodoro Technique and I’ve decided I really need to just try it out for myself. I’m not yet sure if it will work for me, but I’ve been hearing positive things about it.

To that end I set myself the task of a small project using it, that is to create a web page with a pomodoro timer with a visible indicator of time left and that makes a noise when the timer expires. The final pomodoro is to write up this blog post.

This task has a mix of things I already know about (putting together a web page with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery) and things I would have to look up (like how to get a web page to emit a sound at a given point, have it respond to events at timed intervals, and deploy it to the web via Amazon’s AWS).

What I found was that 25 minutes actually goes past very quickly. Secondly, and this is more because it is the Christmas holidays, I still need to discipline myself not to jump to Facebook or Twitter each time my phone beeps or chirrups a notification at me. Similarly, in work I would probably have to discipline myself not to jump to Outlook or Skype when they pop up notifications.

On the whole, it looks like it could be fairly advantageous and I’ll continue to see if it helps productivity.

For the moment, if you do want to have a look at the very simple pomodoro timer that I created, then you can access it here: http://pomodoro.colinmackay.co.uk – I’m also happy to take suggestions on improvements if you think it could be made better.