pomodoro
Latest
White Noise HQ brings you customized focus and relaxation
There are a lot of white noise apps available in the App Store, but this one is by far the most robust. Available in both a free and a paid version for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, White Noise HQ is packed with sounds and customization features. In general, most free apps come with extremely limited features. Even paid versions of similar apps contain only different variations of the same sounds, such as water, crickets, etc... White Noise isn't like that. The free version has 25 sounds that include everything from nature to household sounds and industrial machinery. There are also three different "noise" sounds: white, pink and brown. You can create custom mixes of up to six sounds. Create different mixes for meditation, relaxation and motivation. Another thing, Phase4 Mobile didn't just design White Noise to help you sleep. It's also built to free you from distracts and improve your productivity. There's a timer with very specific preset intervals. If you use the Pomodoro method of productivity, you'll love this for timing your tasks. Those of you who want the timer for sleep will be happy to hear that the audio fades out before shutting off. There's no sudden stopping of the noise to wake you up. My favorite feature is when you mix the white noise sounds with other apps, like Audible. Flip over to the settings panel and enable "mix with other apps." This lets White Noise run in the background while other audio apps are active. I spent some time this weekend listening to the new Lev Grossman novel with the sounds of a train in the background. Audiobooks themselves don't do much to drown out noise. Pairing Audible with White Noise helps. There is a caveat here, your audiobook and White Noise play at the same volume. You have to choose your sounds carefully. For instance, the indoor fan noise is quite loud and made it impossible for me to hear the narrator. Surprisingly, the Russian passenger train (yes, that's really a sound on here) was the perfect background for the book. Have a little fun experimenting and see which sounds compliment the mood of the book to which you are listening. Another nice thing about the free app: It's gorgeous. The high-resolution images of beautiful locations are enough to relax you. It does have ads, but they are relatively unobtrusive. If you are annoyed by the ads, you can spend the US$0.99 for the upgrade, which is labeled White Noise HQ. In addition to being ad-free, you'll get 75 sounds, instead of the 25 that come with the free version. Most of these sounds are redundant, which makes the paid version a lot more like all of its competitors. Does a creek in Texas really sound that different from a creek in a forest? Not to me. Still, there is some variety here, like the vacuum cleaner and industrial heat pump options. The best sound is the virtual space wind. The blizzard one is not bad either. Despite the lack of ads and the wider sound choices, I'm not sure that the upgrade is worth it. Yes, you are only spending $0.99, but the free app gives you plenty of options. Plus, the paid version only comes with six sounds installed. You have to manually download any other sounds that you want. It only takes seconds per sound, but it was enough to annoy me. For those of you who cannot stand ads or really need a wider selection of sounds, then spring for the paid version, otherwise, stick with the free app.
Rest for OS X: Adding coached exercises to productivity management
If you look around the OS X app store, you won't have much trouble finding any number of productivity management apps based on popular techniques like Pomodoro. We're big fans of these utilities here at TUAW. They transform your work into short manageable chunks, enabling you to return to work with renewed vigor and focus. What caught our eye with Rest (US$4.99) was its coached breaks. Rest doesn't just tell you when to take a mental pause, it helps coordinate a short physical refresher with the cognitive one. That's a really clever twist for a crowd that might be a bit tomato-weary. There currently just over a dozen different breaks in all, but that is plenty to for a normal workday. Perhaps the developer will offer more options in the future as app upgrades for greater variety over time. The breaks on offer are easy to do at your desktop and don't involve any special equipment. The app is easy to use. It sits in your menu bar and you can adjust how long each work period and rest period should be. The audio tones were pleasant. The exercises were easy to follow. If you like this category of apps, Rest will easily fit into your work style. An upcoming iOS companion app promises to offer break reminders when you step away from your desk.
Productivity Tip: Focus time
In order to stay productive, you must accomplish tasks. Unfortunately, as communications have sped up and become omnipresent, our focus has been sliced and diced to the paper-thin setting. How many times a day does a calendar invite, Facebook update, email or Tweet send you off your task and down a rabbit hole? Remember when your car didn't have a phone, web browser and fart app in it? In this productivity tip I argue for a cone of silence and a focus on really doing -- by focusing. The timer As I mentioned last week, you should set a timer for each task on your to do list. I like 20-25 minutes, but I also acknowledge that there are tasks which might take more time. Just remember that your brain does get fatigued, which is why Pomodoros are set to 25 minutes each. The cone Hey, see that Do Not Disturb button on your iPhone's Settings? Activate that when you are going "periscope down." I'm not a huge fan of Apple's VIP email, so I tend to not use it to alert me to new emails from certain people. I'll handle email in some posts down the road; it's a huge topic in itself. If you're on your Mac, did you know you can quickly turn off notifications from Notification Center? If you option-click a Notification Center icon in your menu bar, it will toggle on / off those pop-ups which may distract more than help. Oh, and if you're worried about missing an appointment, here's how to avoid that anxiety: Set your timer to end with plenty of time before your next appointment. It seems simple, but if you are carving out actual focus time, you should first look at your calendar and ensure you have plenty of time. A quick glance to remind you about that meeting at 4 PM will allow you to set your timer at 3:30 for 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to pick up and head down to the conference room. (Like email, calendar management is something we'll handle later; it's a huge topic.) If you've shut down your iDevices from making noise and distracting you, and you've got notifications under control on your Mac, it's time to focus. The workspace Without getting too far afield of TUAW's main beat, I'll just say that a clean workspace, proper lighting and a healthy body will aid your focus time immensely. But what about music? What about full-screen apps? What about a program that locks you out of social networks for a specific amount of time? Music I personally don't recommend music if you really need to focus. Sound, on the other hand, can help you focus. An app like Naturespace not only tunes out distractions by providing a seamless, repeating audio landscape, but can also help keep your mind and body calm by simulating the outdoors. I listen to music when checking email or doing reviews, but when I have to focus on numbers or edit words, I find a simple audioscape blends into the background, helping my focus without a melodic hook to distract me. Full-screen apps Full-screen apps are all the rage since Apple started featuring them in Lion, but will they help you focus? In my opinion they will, if you let them. An application running in full-screen mode will obscure that funny desktop picture, and obliterates any dock alerts or menu items. So if you find those keep nagging at your mind, use full-screen mode. Still, it's easy enough to Cmd-Tab to another app and get distracted, so I'm not convinced this alone will enhance your focus time. Social networks Better still, particularly if you have Facebook on speed dial, is an application which will (virtually) smack your hand when you access your social sites -- or cut off access altogether, if you're incorrigible. If you are constantly wondering what George Takei is posting, or how many likes, favorites or retweets that clever thing you posted 30 minutes ago received, you may need something to force you to ignore the big social world out there for a while. Since I do research online, I can't fall back to the old "turn off the internet" trick. Instead, I rely on apps to help center my attention -- and working at home introduces a whole raft of distractions we'll cover another time. There's a good roundup of "focus" apps here at Mac.AppStorm, but I want to point out two that can really help: Anti-social and Houdini. Houdini will automatically hide applications after a set amount of time, and it's free. If you combine this with an app like Backdrop, which will hide your cluttered desktop (well, mine gets bad after a day's work but yet again this is a topic for another day), you'll soon find you have drifted into a focus zone. That's because whatever you're working on is the only visible application and desktop distractions are minimized. If you routinely have more than six applications open on your Mac at a time, this can be a timesaver versus going through each one and hiding the app (Cmd-H). My favorite app for focus, besides my timer, is Anti-Social. It costs $15, but if you find yourself instinctively reaching for Twitter or Facebook in your browser everytime a pithy phrase pops into your head, Anti-Social will force you to stay focused. The application will block the social sites you specify for a set amount of time. If you want to tweet before the time limit (which you set) expires, you'll have to reboot your Mac! Of course, you could always use your phone, but let's pretend you're putting that away during focus time. Easy does it To prevent procrastination and ensure you're making time to focus, schedule time on your calendar. Turn off notifications. Turn on social blockers or enable a timer and stick with it. The simpler you make your cone of silence, the more likely you are to ensconce yourself in it at least once a day. While there are times for multi-tasking, there are many more times where it behooves you to carve out focus time and stick with it. I believe that you'll find you get more done in less time if you stick with one task at a time. As for task management, guess what? Yep, that's what we'll handle in an upcoming post.
Friday Favorite: Due
Yesterday around the TUAW water cooler a number of us expressed our love of Due, an app for Mac and iOS that is basically a simple timer/reminder application (my original review here). After trying dozens of timer apps, I think Due wins for a number of features that make it stand out from a very crowded field. After all, your iDevice comes with a timer in the Clock app, and there's Apple's Reminders app. While Reminders syncs with iCloud, your alarms in the Clock app do not. Due can help you stay focused and never overcook a boiling egg again. Due's interface is simple as can be. There are three views: Reminders, Timers and Logged Reminders. You can quickly set a reminder for later in the day, or whenever. Due accepts natural language instructions, so you could say "next Thursday at 1 PM" and it'll set a reminder alarm for just that. Note that Due doesn't integrate with the built-in Reminders app, so I'm only referring to reminders (lower case) within Due itself. Once a reminder has gone off or you check it off manually, those go into Logged Reminders. This is handy if you need to recall what you did or if you need to remind yourself of the same thing again, later. I tend to use the timer function more frequently (as I use my calendar for appointments and OmniFocus for repeating tasks and "to do" items). I have a 25-minute timer for Pomodoros, a 5-minute timer for breaks and a couple of others for things I need to do at some point in the day, but things which require me to focus on just that thing for an allotted amount of time. By doing this, I help my squirrel-like brain stay focused on some critical tasks throughout the day, but it also helps me be flexible enough to not dread going out of being flexible in my daily schedule (more on this in next week's Productivity Tip). Best of all, Due has just the right number of preferences. From changing sounds to setting a snooze time, Due can be as intrusive or quiet as you like. You can even change the alarms to use Notification Center or Growl -- handy especially if you use something like Prowl. I particularly like the option to "suppress alerts on launch and wake" because I hate opening my Mac to have 30 alarms from past events going off all at once. Is it just me or is that "throw a million notifications at me on wake" thing seem a very obtrusive, Windows 98-like behavior? But I digress. Due is a rock-solid, beautifully designed app. iCloud sync works flawlessly (you can also use Dropbox) across my Macs and iDevices, meaning I always have what I need where I need it. Most importantly, Due keeps me focused on doing things, and not setting myself up to do things, which is precisely what technology should be doing. You can get the Mac app here or the iOS version here.
Steampunk and the Pomodoro Technique creates The Amazing Mechanical Pomodoro
Last November, I wrote a post about the Pomodoro Technique of getting things done. The technique involves using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to get you to concentrate on work for a set period of time before taking a mandatory break, and it's very useful for those of us who tend to get easily distracted. Well, I'm also a fan of steampunk, so when an email from ThinkOrange introduced me to The Amazing Mechanical Pomodoro, I just had to bite. The US$1.99 app is probably the best looking Pomodoro timer I've ever seen, with a nice Victorian-looking set of instructions about the Pomodoro Technique, a lovely brass, wood, and ivory timer, and even a history of your completed Pomodoros. However, there is a tiny bug about the size of an adult rhinoceros beetle in this app that currently makes it a bit worthless, other than being extremely nice looking. When the iPhone goes to sleep, the counter stops counting down. Since I don't wish to keep my iPhone's screen active during most of my work, that's a huge problem that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The timer also gets reset to zero if you tap on the "How It Works" or "History" buttons at the bottom of the screen. It's nice enough to make me want to put on a rough wool suit and hat to do my work, but only if I can also give my 27" iMac a bit of that Victorian flair before I start. Huzzah for the gentlemen and ladies at ThinkOrange for creating this beautiful mechanical wonder! Now if they can just make it work properly... Check out the gallery below for more screenshots. %Gallery-98680%
The Pomodoro Technique, or how a tomato made me more productive
I've alluded to my search for personal organization a couple of times during 2009. While it's not something that I'm obsessing about, I now capture my major goals in Things, and that at least tells me what I'm supposed to be doing in terms of short and long-term goals. However, I found that sometimes I couldn't figure out how to organize a single day in my calendar, simply because I would jump around to all sorts of projects and never get even one of them accomplished. Back in August, fellow TUAW blogger Brett Terpstra started writing a post about The Pomodoro Technique™. Being a foodie and part Italian, I knew that pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, so I asked Brett if he was talking about cooking. What he turned me on to was a wonderful concentration and organization technique. In 1992, a student by the name of Francesco Cirillo was looking for a way of improving his study habits. He took a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (hence the name Pomodoro) and found that if he broke tasks into 25-minute sessions, now known as Pomodoros, followed by a 5-minute break, and then took a longer 15-minute break after four Pomodoros, he was able to concentrate more fully on the tasks at hand and accomplish more work. The technique is deceptively simple, easy to implement, and surprisingly effective. You can download Cirillo's book for free and learn more about the technique at the official website, just to see if the method works for you. If it does, then you might want to look at the assortment of Mac and iPhone applications designed to help you time your Pomodoros and get more work done. That's the focus of the rest of this post.
