InOculus

Break time is just as important as focus time, and the rising popularity of the pomodoro technique reveals that increasingly more people are becoming aware of the diminishing returns of heavily prioritizing the latter. Yes, the longer and more frequent the breaks, the better, but the pomodoro technique seeks to strike a balance: sprinkle in some breaks at regular intervals, and productivity will increase.

InOculus is a minimalist pomodoro timer app that will remind you to take a break every now and then. It will start counting down your focus and break times, so that you can get the most out of your time without neglecting your health or productivity.

The app is very inconspicuous in terms of the screen real estate it occupies. It comes in the form of a timer that you can drag anywhere you want on your desktop. Even though the timer itself does not take up that much screen space, making it resizable in the future would be appreciated.

Make sure to set your focus and break intervals in the settings. Decide on what works best for you and start the timer when beginning work. Once focus time is over, the program will display a message to urge you to take a break.

If it’s something really important, you can opt to skip break time via the Escape key. Regardless of whether you end break time this way, or wait for it to count down naturally, the program will then go back to counting down your focus time, and so on.

I appreciated the program's set-and-forget nature and its overall ease of use, which made for a smooth experience overall after configuring my focus and break intervals. InOculus might be somewhat basic for some users, however: a Stats feature would be a nice addition, and customizing the look of the timer and break screen wouldn’t hurt either.