Pomodouroboros

Most pomodoro trackers assume you’re going to start them. But time and tide wait for no one - the great pomodoro of the cosmos is cold and dark, and it goes on forever.

For people with ADHD or other executive function disorders, time blindness is common; the inability to notice that time is passing or initiate tasks at an appropriate time. It’s easy to let half the day slip by before starting your first pomodoro.

Pomodouroboros’s goal is to:

1. stay constantly in your visual field so that you will ABSOLUTELY not forget to set some goals
2. remind you that death stalks your every step, and the pomodoros are happening whether you’re making use of them or not

The way it accomplishes this is to have a pre-existing schedule, where the pomodoros are always running, whether you’ve said what you’re going to do with them or not. There’s a large, transparent progress pie-chart in the middle of your screen showing the progress of the current one on all displays, in different colors depending on whether you haven’t set an intention yet:

If you have set one for the current block:

Or if you’re taking a break:

If you successfully set an intention, you can evaluate the pomodoro afterwards:

You can also list the pomodoros in the current day (shown here in “test” mode, which lets you experiment with a very short “day” that progresses rapidly while developing the app):

The status item in the menu bar shows 4 items:

• A 🍅 (if your intentionality exceeds your distraction) or 🥫 (if you are mostly distracted). The point is to get the fresh tomato!
• A number before a “✓” indicating how many “success points” you’ve got for the current day, gained by focused or successful pomodoros, and for setting intentions
• A number before a “✕” indicating how many “distraction points” you’ve got for the current day
• A number before a “?” indicating how many completed or in-progress pomodoros that you can currently evaluate for success.
• A number before a “…” indicating how many pomodoros remain before the end of the day.

Status

Currently, Pomodouroboros’s implementation quality is very rough, and probably not suitable for anyone other than people who know, or want to learn, Python, in order to help fix it up. As such there is no packaged build for end-users yet. However, hopefully in the not too distant future, releases will be available from the “Releases” tab.

Right now there’s only a Mac frontend since that’s the platform I use day-to-day, but I’d really like to get Windows and Linux frontends as soon as possible.

If “person with ADHD who knows or wants to learn Python” sounds like you, have a look at the list of issues to find something simple to contribute! In order to run it, make sure you have Xcode installed (like actual, for-real Xcode, not the command-line tools; this is a GUI, not a command-line thing, so you need the GUI development tools) make a virtualenv, pip install -Ur requirements.txt, and then run ./runme.

Note that if you really want to keep using the app, ./testme creates a different test bundle so you can run through some quick, fake test pomodoros without conflicting with the real-time instance that you're using.