September 09, 2005

Fob - Countdown timer for OS X

Picture 3-18 I put a lot of items on my to do list every day. I only get about 25% of them crossed off. This was getting to be demoralizing, so I recently started using a timer to force me to do at least a little bit of every thing on my list.

For example, I have a bunch of Quicken housekeeping to do -- hours and hours of it. I dread it, but it has to be done, for tax purposes. I don't want to blow an entire day doing it, so I've started attacking it in 15 minute chunks each day, which is much more bearable. I use a free OS X program called Fob, from Leaky Puppy Software, as a countdown timer.

Fob lets you set up and store a list of timers that you can use whenever you want. I have a timer that I can activate that gives me 30 minutes to research a book I'm working on. I have another timer that lets me work on a painting for 20 minutes (in this case, I use this as a timer to force me to stop doing something fun, as opposed to the Quicken timer, which I use to encourage me to do something I hate).

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has written some great stuff about using timers to beat procrastination. Just today I noticed that he reviewed another Mac-based timer called Minuteur. It looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Link/