MacOS Tiny Pomodoro

Today's post brings the smallest (useful) snippet I could think of to get me some pomodoro workflow, or really any sort of ad hoc timeboxing.

sleep $((25 * 60)) && say 'all done'


Breaking it down:

• sleep: delays processing for some time. Note that the version with MacOS does not recognize the m suffix like Linux would and only handles seconds, so to get minutes we do a bit of math.
• $(( expr )): this syntax allows us to do arithmetic in substition form.
• && is a conditional that ties sleep with the rest of the command, which is handy to chain it in a single line.
• say: plays out the input using text-to-speech; there are a bunch of additional parameters, but this should get the job done.

And that's it - a short and sweet one-liner you can run in any MacOS terminal.

This is useful to make sure that you take breaks and keep yourself on track, especially when doing something where it's easy to get distracted like emails or catching up on messages (please don't interrupt your focused work after only 25 minutes!)

Happy timeboxing!

Tags:  management shell

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