Flow

Time management under your terms.

Why Flow

I found that the Pomodoro technique breaks my flow when I'm successfully immerse in a certain task.

Some people suggest changing the amount of intervals and try out things like 35/5, 50/10 or 45/10, But this hasn't proven to be effective for me either.

What is Flow, then?

Flow is a minimalistic time-management tool that helps you maintaining a good balance among activity and rest. While you are working, you are earning time to rest later. If you start feeling tired, you can take a break and the time counts down. Flow gives you feedback on whether you are working too much, or resting more than enough.

What are the trade-offs

Flow is excellent if you want to be highly productive and in a flow state, while keep a good balance between activity and rest. However, this same flexibility makes Flow not so good as a planning technique, something Pomodoro is good at.

If you are a programmer or a designer, and like me, you perform better when deeply immerse in what you are doing, then Flow is for you!

Flow in action

Here you are:

http://flownow.herokuapp.com/

You can customize the duration of the work phase and the rest factor.

The default one is thought for cycles up to one hour of work and a rest factor of 30%, which is the same as if we customized flow this way:

http://flownow.herokuapp.com/?limit=1hour&factor=0.3

For demoing the UI, the following one is configured with a limit of 30 seconds working and a rest factor of 50% (rest half of the time):

http://flownow.herokuapp.com/?limit=30seconds&factor=0.5

Another cool thing about flow, is that it's really easy to add different ways of interacting with it. The bubble is the default theme, but you can easily create a different one:

http://flownow.herokuapp.com/?theme=chronometer&limit=60seconds&factor=0.2

Want to contribute?

Any idea or feedback to make Flow better is very welcome.

If you want to play around and customize it, fork this:

$ git clone git://github.com/miguelff/flow.git

Make your changes, and if you are proud of them, open a pull-request.

Credits

Copyright (c) 2014, Miguel Fernández, Released under the MIT license.

Flow is that cool because of the work done by its contributors:

• Marcelino Llano
• Miguel Romero
• Fernando Blat
• Jorge Manrubia
• Pau Valiente