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What’s with the egg timer, you wonder? It’s something that I’ve been using to get my butt into gear so that I can work on something that I don’t feel like working on.

Here’s what I do: I set the timer for 45 minutes. I tell myself to work on whatever it is that I don’t want to work on for only 45 minutes. No more. No less. Just 45 minutes. When the alarm goes off, I stop. I might write only one paragraph, an opening or a closing. I may stare at my monitor and only type out a few sentences. If the project feels like a particularly big job, I may organize things for that 45 minutes. I’ll pull together notes, arrange them in a file, highlight things that are important, and so on. If I need to work on a design, I set up my documents, look at the images I need to work with, and do some digital sketches and color schemes. Whatever it is that I’m stuck with, I give it 45 minutes. Once that alarm goes off, I stop.

This method tends to work for me. More often than not, something does start to come together and I want to work longer. But I don’t. I move onto something else. What generally happens is that later in the day I start to crave the original project that I had a hard time with. I get an idea, or ideas, and I want to return to the project. Generally by the next day, I find myself looking forward to working on the very projected that I dreaded. Okay, there are some jobs that I still muddle through. Even so, I know that if I put those 45 minutes in, eventually I will get it finished.

Now, the problem with my egg timer: It ticks. And it ticks loudly. And it has a very shrill alarm that not only jolts me, but jolts my sweetie 92 pound doggie off the floor and into high alert mode. While most of the time I can handle the ticking, especially when I muffle it with a towel, the alarm is annoying. As a result, I’ve been looking for a new timer that is quiet and has a soothing alarm (is that an oxymoron?).

Enter widgets. Widgets are small little programs that can be added to the Mac OSX Dashboard. I visited the widget page at Apple to sift through the thousands available. There were so many capturing my attention that I got totally sidetracked. There’s even a juice bar widget that provides a new fruit juice recipe daily! After digressing, I returned to the matter at hand and found two promising timers.

How could I resist a widget called EggTimer? This one is very straight forward: Set the time, click the Start button, and off it goes. The timer doesn’t tick and the alarm is three chimes. Three? By the second chime my doggie’s ears started to perk up.

ProdMe is the second widget that I downloaded. Its sound is described as “the chimes of a grandfather clock …” This timer has lots of neat features, including text alerts. While it can’t be set for more than an hour (at least I haven’t discovered it yet), the chime is one melodic note that I like and that doesn’t bother my dog one bit.

Sure I could have used iCal, but I like these widgets.

I now have two quiet timers, each with a soothing alarm. Now to get busy.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Computer-related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.