If you have trouble staying focused at work, there’s an app for that.

Disclaimer: if you let yourself, it’s easy to spend more time reading about and playing with focus apps than you save with them. Therefore, I recommend trying just one of these tools at a time, and only downloading them if you plan to install and use it right away. If you don’t start using a focus app right, you are just distracting yourself in the name of getting focused.

Pomodoro

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a wonderfully simple method to work efficiently, with great focus, and take breaks that give you a chance to stretch and keep your body healthy as well as give your brain a rest to come back to the next task with full mental clarity.

Essentially, you choose an amount of time to work on a single task and then a short break. You attempt to complete as many of these cycles during your work day as possible without breaking focus.

During the work time, you are only allowed to work on the chosen task. If you do anything else, the rules say you must restart the timer and not count the pomodoro. It’s generally recommended to start with short time periods such as 5 or 10 minutes of unbroken focused work, and build up to say, 15, 25 and even 45 minutes of focused work at a time.

Pomodoro Apps

If you want that classic tomato clock look, pomodroido is great android app to count your pomodoro sessions. Clear Focus is another with a cleaner, zen look.

Of course, you can always go old school and buy a physical tomato timer. Sometimes, in a digital world, having a physical item for your timer and to do list, is harder to ignore.

Focus Booster – Desktop Pomodoro App

Working on both mac and windows, Focus Booster is a handy little timer stays visible on top of all your browser windows and counts down your desired focus session time, then dings and ticks to announce your break time. It has an option to turn off the tick during the break, but I like and recommend keeping it on, because it prevents me from ignoring the ding and working through the break to “just finish one more thing”. The annoying tick sound forces me to stand up and take a stretch break better than anything else. Until I am more disciplined at taking breaks, I am happy to have this little annoying friend to get me out of my seat.

Momentum Google Chrome Browser Extension

One of the easiest ways to break your focus is to allow yourself to open a dozen browser tabs, following a chain of articles, apps, blogs, videos, etc. Before you know it, you’re working on three non important tasks, researching plane tickets, replying to messages on Facebook and checking out the latest music videos.

Momentum, a browser extension for Google Chrome, takes that key moment of opening a new browser tab and asks you a simple but important question, “What is your main focus for today?” It also reminds you the time, which, ticking away, may remind you the urgency of said focus, and a very beautiful background photo and quote for a quick dose of inspiration.

Rescue Time

If you’re not sure where all the time is going in the day, Rescue Time will tell you. This little app is like your very own little Big Brother that allows you to spy on yourself, reporting back the amount of time you spent on High, Medium and Low value tasks (which you can configure by website or category), on particular sites or applications (if you install the desktop app), and if you like, will even lock you out of certain sites or site categories if you’ve spent more than an alloted amount of time in them.

I personally stopped using this app as I didn’t find the information very useful, already having cut out a lot of my online distraction time, like researching, reading blogs, newspapers, watching youtube, and playing online games.

But if you want to get a better picture of how you’re spending your time, or need a little reinforcement to get yourself off low value activities, Rescue Time does this very well.