Vitamin-R for Mac

Productivity tool to help you focus on one task at a time

Focusing one task at a time is essential to getting a job done properly but it's harder than ever when we're constantly online.

Vitamin-R is a Menu Bar tool for managing your attention and maintaining motivation. It blocks other apps and distractions while you set a specific time period to complete a task. Vitamin-R is particularly useful for large tasks as it helps break them down into a series of short "time slices" of between 10 and 30 minutes, each with specific objective. During this time, you're reminded that the clock is ticking either by audio warnings or menu bar displays of the ticking clock.

Vitamin-R is based around a pad that is logically divided into Now, Later, Scratch and Objective pads. Now is for jotting down points relevant to the objective you are working on - great if you're trying to structure and article or essay logically. Later is for all those tasks you need to do later and not applicable to the task at hand. The Scratch pad is used for scribbling down random thoughts and notes and finally Objective is your main objective list. In addition to all this, Vitamin-R can also be used as an analysis tool as it asks you how you felt during an objective - were you distracted, focused, "in flow" etc.

Vitamin-R is an intelligent application that's been well thought out. The frequent time reminders are handy ways of reminding you how much time you have left although the robotic voice sounds a bit weird. It only takes about 5 minutes to work out how to use the app although that is a small distraction in itself. Some may consider it a bit distracting to keep having to respond to the prompts that Vitamin-R makes while you are working as well as using the Pads but I felt it improved my overall concentration. Note that it doesn't block Growl alerts however and there's no way to pause it which you may need to do in emergencies for example.

Vitamin-R is a well thought-out, slick and organized application that should improve your productivity and concentration on the net.

The new version adds adds the ability to exclude specific applications from the eliminate distractions step.

Changes

• The new version adds adds the ability to exclude specific applications from the eliminate distractions step.