For those who don’t know, Forest is a simple IOS app for tracking productive time. I used it for over two years and liked the concept, but relying on a phone app caused problems.
For example, I often forgot whether I had started the timer and had to check my phone again to see if it was ticking. This may seem trivial, but it happened far too often and became a nuisance. I also had to pick up my phone every time I started or stopped the timer.
The Forest app was the only reason I used my phone while I was being productive. An extra device for such a basic functionality didn’t make sense once I thought about it. So, I looked for an alternative on my computer. Hence this setup was born. An extra positive effect is that now I keep my phone far away from my desk while working, which prevents me from picking it up to scroll when I feel bored.
I don’t use this plugin as a traditional pomodoro timer. For example, I set the break time to zero, so once 30 minutes are up, it starts another work session without any breaks in between. I find that premature breaks distract me and make it hard to refocus later.
You can display the timer in the status bar. It’s useful to see if the timer is running, and it also makes it easy to start or stop whenever you need.
The Pomodoro plugin creates inline fields for your work session. I set it up to keep them in my daily notes, but there is an option to keep them in a separate note as well. I then use other plugins to visualize this data.
You will need the Pomodoro Timer, Heatmap, Dataview, and Charts plugins to create this system in your vault. However, the Charts and Heatmap plugins are not must-haves. I use the Heatmap plugin to see every day of the year, and the Charts plugin for visualizing monthly and weekly data.
I hope this would be of some use to someone. Setting this up was a process but now I have used it for three weeks, I definitely recommend it over using a phone app (if you always have Obsidian open). It’s been a really nice quality of life improvement for me.
