Monday 18 January 2010

Simple Pomodoro Timer

Create it yourself!

From time to time everybody has boring work that must be taken care of. I often use the pomodoro technique to stay focused and get it done, so that I can move on to the more inspiring things in life.

Sometimes though, there's no kitchen timer available. Like today.

This is how you can create the world's smallest (66 bytes) pomodoro timer in ten seconds on your PC:

  1. Open a CMD window.
  2. Type in the following:

    copy con: pomodoro.bat
    @echo off
    echo Started %TIME%
    sleep 1500
    echo Time's up!! ^G^G^G [press Ctrl-G three times here]
    ^Z [press Ctrl-Z here, then press enter]

  3. You may also need to create sleep.bat. Type in the following:

    copy con: sleep.bat
    @ping -n %1 127.0.0.1 > nul
    ^Z [press Ctrl-Z here, then press enter]
Start the timer by typing pomodoro or doubleclicking on the file's icon.

2 comments:

  1. What is sleep.bat's purpose? Is that in case 'sleep 1500' doesn't work with someone's default?

    Thanks for the program, it is exactly what I've been looking for.

    ReplyDelete