---
title: 'My Scripts for Pomodoro Desktop'
url: 'https://stevenjaycohen.com/journal/my-scripts-for-pomodoro-desktop'
markdown: 'https://stevenjaycohen.com/journal/my-scripts-for-pomodoro-desktop.md'
date: '2010-03-26'
description: 'Pomodoro Desktop is a great utility to aid in Time Management. It helps break tasks down into simple, bite-sized chunks. My workplace has a simple policy. If your iChat status is set to DND (Do Not Disturb), people leave you alone completely. I have found that people stress out less about not being…'
taxonomy:
  category:
    - Journal
  tag:
    - 'os x'
    - software
---

# My Scripts for Pomodoro Desktop

## [My Scripts for Pomodoro Desktop](https://stevenjaycohen.com/journal/my-scripts-for-pomodoro-desktop)

    26th Mar 2010   [os x](https://stevenjaycohen.com/tag:os%20x#body-wrapper) [software](https://stevenjaycohen.com/tag:software#body-wrapper)  

[Pomodoro Desktop](https://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/) is a great utility to aid in Time Management. It helps break tasks down into simple, bite-sized chunks.

My workplace has a simple policy. If your iChat status is set to DND (Do Not Disturb), people leave you alone completely. I have found that people stress out less about not being able to talk with me if they know when I will be available next. So, I wrote these simple scripts for Pomodoro Desktop to keep everyone in the loop.

NOTE: The **delay 1** in the middle of the scripts works around a bug in iChat for Mac OSX 10.6.x. Without the delay, the status message does not always show.

START:

```
tell application "iChat"
    set status to away
end tell
delay 1
set timeStr to time string of ((current date) + (25 * minutes))
set Pos to offset of ":" in timeStr
set timeStr to (characters 1 thru (Pos + 2) of timeStr as string) & characters (Pos + 6) thru end of timeStr as string
set message to "DND - Available at " & timeStr
tell application "iChat"
    set status message to message
end tell
```

END:

```
tell application "iChat"
    set status to available
end tell
delay 1
set timeStr to time string of ((current date) + (5 * minutes))
set Pos to offset of ":" in timeStr
set timeStr to (characters 1 thru (Pos + 2) of timeStr as string) & characters (Pos + 6) thru end of timeStr as string
set message to "Available until " & timeStr
tell application "iChat"
    set status message to message
end tell
```

BREAK END:

```
tell application "iChat"
    set status to available
end tell
delay 1
set message to "Available"
tell application "iChat"
    set status message to message
end tell
```

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---

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