Description

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals separated by breaks. The technique employs agile project management concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.

There are five basic steps to implementing the technique:

1. decide on the task to be done
2. set the pomodoro (timer) to 25 minutes
3. work on the task until the timer rings; record with an x
4. take a short break (5 minutes)
5. every four “pomodori” take a longer break (15–20 minutes)

What have we done

At Reveloper we’ve been actively using the Pomodoro Technique for almost 2 years – it is a very efficient and productive time management method and we’re simply loving it. But unfortunately, we noticed that the manual (read pen and paper) usage of the technique tends to be very time consuming and repetitive, especially in regards to the planning and analytics stages.

We tried some of the existing softwares but found out that none of them provided a complete implementation of the technique (most of them were just glorified timers). That’s when we decided to build our own tool – we architected, designed it and developed it and as the application grew, we decided to release it for free, to allow others to use it as well.

Technologies

Ruby on Rails, jQuery, CSS font-embedding