Focus Booster (for Mac)
Focus Booster is a free Mac utility that uses the Pomodoro Technique to help you complete projects, but a few issues keep it from being a must-have utility.
It's incredibly easy to allow yourself to become distracted by the Internet's wilds, but, as the kids say, "there's an app for that." The free Focus Booster is a lightweight, simple Mac utility that's designed to help keep you locked into the task at hand. If you find yourself constantly straying from a project to check email, update a Facebook status, or play a game, this app may eliminate distractions—if you adhere to what it's attempting to accomplish.
The Focus Booster Experience
Focus Booster uses the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method created by Francesco Cirillo. The technique dissects work into 25-minute sections known as "pomodoros" that are separated by 5-minute breaks. Focus Booster uses that as its base, but serves up some user-specific flexibility. You can alter the work blocks to a length more to your liking (as well as the break times), activate a ticker that sounds as time passes, and set alarms to alert you when you're at the end of a work.
Clicking the start button begins the countdown and should you activate the ticking sound effect, you'll hear that, too. Focus Booster also fills its thin, black, rectangular body with a colored bar that serves as a visual representation of how much time has passed. The bar starts as green, but turns golden yellow as the time limit draws near. You can't, unfortunately, alter the bar's colors. I would have preferred the bar to turn red as a sign that time's running out.
That's a small gripe, but I have a larger one: Focus Booster doesn't loop. It proceeds from work to break, but doesn't circle back around and automatically begin playing the work portion again; you need to manually activate it. This means that you have a second break to get involved in all manner of shenanigans if you don't immediately hit the button again to keep the flow. That said, Focus Booster, by default, lives on top of all other apps you open, so it's somewhat hard to ignore.
Time After Time
If you're an OS X user who wants an app to nudge you in the right direction, Focus Booster will do the job nicely. Focus Booster lacks a feature—auto-loop—that would've made it more useful to those of us who are easily distracted, but even as is, it's a capable free solution.
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