Working from home I often find myself not wanting to take a break sometimes; with all the comforts of home it can be hard to realize how hard I am working. Recently, I came across GrooveOtter, which is purportedly an app that will help you get things done and not feel exhausted. Well, it’s not an app; it’s a website.
The way GroveOtter works is you enter in a list of tasks, and then you work on the task for the time period you choose. You can choose from 15, 25 or 45 minutes. Then when you finish that time period it asks you if you have finished the task; if not, then you take a break. If you have finished, then the line grows longer and you still take a break; after 4 time periods you take a longer break. According to the GrooveOtter folks, this is the science of breaks. While I don’t necessarily agree with them on the concept of this being a science, I DO agree breaks are important and I DO take them. However, sometimes I can’t take a break at these intervals. Sometimes I need to actually work for 2 to 3 hours straight depending on what I am doing; I can’t just leave a process I am working on unless I am at a good stopping point. It’s an interesting concept, but I am not sure how well this works for the kind of work I do, and I know it just won’t work for me with it being a webpage. It really needs to be an app on my phone or tablet and not only have a timer but also have a real audible noise, or I just will ignore it.
I do, on occasion, keep ToDo lists using tools like Google Keep, Todo.txt and some internal tools my company uses, but I really couldn’t adopt something that doesn’t save the state of what I am doing from work day to work day. If I have to continually enter a list of tasks into a tool … it’s just not going to work for me. There’s one thing GrooveOtter did get me thinking about: What OTHER tools are there beyond the ones I use already? GroveOtter may not necessarily work for me, but if I find something like this I’ll let you know.
What do you think? Cool concept? Will it work for you? Write below.
