Here's my attempt to suggest a more complicated coding snack for skwire to chew on. (In reference to the other thread.)
Since
Pomodorium turns out to be shareware, I decided to post this request anyway.
I think one thing I realized with the gaming aspect of productivity tools is that often times it makes you even more bored to play the game since it shifts the flow around.
(For those who don't want to bother playing Pomodorium, the game aspect mainly involves getting gold from doing Pomodoroes, using those golds to buy equipments and potions to clear out cities full of monsters and then finally moving on to the next city.)
One concept I wanted to shift away from Pomodorium's concept is the buying mechanics.
Instead of gold, I wonder if calculating the avg. pomodoro per day could determine the task at hand sort of like a stoplight.
I'm not sure the idea was warranted of a productivity program and really the idea was more of an experimental curiosity on my part on whether it can improve on the classic model of a pomodoro timer.
The basics of the interface are this:This is how Pomodorium initially looks when opened:
| Pomodorium |
| 25:00 | Go (switches to Stop when pressed) |
| poms (total pomodoro) | avg/d: (number) | gold: |
| Health |
| Exp: |
| Level: |
| Cities free: |
The tweak on the concept would be:
| 25:00 | Go | avg/d: (number) | red/green/yellow stoplight icon | tasks checked off per day |
| Task screen |
P.S. Pomodorium has sound effects when Go is pressed as well as when gold is gained.
The task screen would be like how speed readers work: Shorter tasks show bigger fonts, longer tasks show smaller font.
The twist is that the screen is blank/or the texts blurred/made transparent
when the timer is on. That is, only when you stop the timer or pass the time will a task show up in the task screen.
This is actually for two reasons:
1) To give the user the idea that he doesn't necessarily need to do the task on the screen to start the timer.
but more importantly...
#2 To prey on the procrastination of the user. This way if the user wants to procrastinate on the task on screen, this doesn't mean he mentally "defeats" himself by feeling like he's procrastinating just because he dropped the ball on a task.
This is the first effect I want to test. Does a big shiny green timer button that engages the brain stir procrastinating people to actually do more tasks just not the one in front of them?
Here's the game-based idea:The stop lights are based on the avg/pomodoro per day. Actually pomodoro is much stricter than this but in here we'll just assume that users are playing a loose version.
For this one, one thing I wanted to find out is if whether pomodoro flow increases or reduces the activity of the users so the idea is, the more you increase your avg/pomodoro per day: the more the program would show the more difficult tasks to do.
...but with a twist.
If you exceed a certain average, the stoplight will then treat this as an "over-fatigued" state and would then advice on tasks relating to rising off a computer or going outside.
It basically goes: easy,
intermediate,
hard, GET OUT!
The sad part is that I can't really do a survey on this and the program is really just like a personal experience test which, again, is why I didn't originally want to post this. I'm getting redundant I know but seeing as skwire is active lately, may as well throw this out there. I would also prefer this to be cross-platform like how Pomodorium is based on Adobe Air and is based on flash but I could also work with a Windows version or even better a portable version.
As far as how the tasks are actually inserted, I'll leave that to you guys but Pomodorium does have a menu where one can customize the monsters. It's a bit clunky but just throwing out the thought that a menu is possible but if it's too complicated, import text file would work great too.
