An integrated pomodoro timer for Visual Studio

As part of my ongoing fight against procrastination, I recently started using the Pomodoro Technique to help me focus on the job at hand.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, the Pomodoro Technique is a time management practice invented by Francesco Cirillo while he was a student in the late 1980s. It works by dividing a day into a series of focused 25-minute slices, called pomodoros, broken up by short breaks away from work.

The beginning of the day is given over to planning which tasks are to be accomplished, resulting in a prioritised list. Then, pomodoros are used to progress through the list of tasks in order, working as many pomodoros as necessary to complete each task. When a pomodoro finishes, a mark is placed next to the relevant item from the list, so that the time spent on each task can easily be tracked.

Pomodoros are indivisible, so interruptions are not allowed. If an interruption does occur, that pomodoro is declared void and the timer is reset. Equally, completing a task 'early' results in the remaining time being spent on overlearning; either reviewing, repeating or improving whatever has just been done.

One of the requirements of the technique is that the timer is always visible. Because most of my work occurs in Microsoft Visual Studio, I thought it would be useful to have an integrated pomodoro timer that runs in a docked Visual Studio tool window. As well as making it easy to glance at while coding, such a timer would also enable a visual alarm to be used, thus sparing the concentration of co-workers who might not appreciate a bell or buzzer sounding off every 25 minutes or so.

To that end, I've built VSPomodoro, an integrated pomodoro timer for Visual Studio. It is a very basic little add-in, but I've pushed it up to GitHub in case anyone else is interested. I've also made an installer available for those people that are interested in using it without looking at the code.