Practical, honest guides to doing your best cognitive work on a Mac.

Focused knowledge work is getting harder. Notifications, endless tabs and the pull of shallow busywork make it a real skill to start something demanding, stay with it, and protect the thinking time that actually moves your work forward. This section collects what I’ve learned about doing exactly that on the Mac, over nearly thirty years of making software for people who work with their minds.

The guides start from the problem, not the product. Where a paid tool genuinely helps I say so (and I make two of them), but every guide is written to be useful whether or not you buy anything.

Guides

  • Timeboxing: what it is and how to do it well: the technique itself, how it differs from time blocking and Pomodoro, how long a box should be, what to do at the edges of a box, and a free one-page template. Start here if the method is new to you.
  • The best Pomodoro apps for Mac: the free menu bar timers, the subscription apps and the one-time purchases compared honestly, with what three years of each costs and which fits which kind of work.
  • Pomodoro vs Flowtime: the fixed timer against working until your focus fades, what each gets right and gives up, and the soft-edged middle path between them.
  • Time boxing on a Mac: the free and built-in ways to try the technique, and the dedicated apps built for it. Read this once you know the method and want a tool.
  • Focus apps for ADHD on a Mac: an honest look at why focus is hard with ADHD and what actually helps, from someone who makes focus software (not a clinician).
  • The Pomodoro Technique for ADHD: why the standard 25/5 rhythm trips ADHD brains, what the evidence actually says, and the seven changes that make it stick.
  • Task initiation with ADHD: why starting is harder than continuing, and the five-minute stealth task recipe that gets past the brain’s alarm.
  • Deep work on a Mac: how to protect long, undistracted blocks for your most demanding work, with the free tools and the dedicated apps.

The tools

Two of my apps are built for this kind of work, and they pair naturally:

  • Vitamin-R is a focus and time boxing app: it structures your work into short, single-objective sessions, keeps you on track, and turns your effort into visible progress. A one-time purchase, popular with people who have ADHD.
  • Burst Notes is a quick-capture notes app: it gets fleeting thoughts out of your head in a few keystrokes, so an intruding idea never has to break your concentration or get lost.

Used together, Vitamin-R governs how you focus and Burst Notes protects your working memory while you do. Both are Mac-native, one-time purchases from publicspace.net, which has made Mac software since 1996.