When the 25-minute timer ends or finish earlier and press the Cancel button, the appointment is removed: Thankfully he had made the workflows available on GitHub, so with some small modifications I was able to connect them to my Power App and have the appointments get triggered when the Pomodoro button was pressed.Īs you can see below, here is my unassuming calendar before I press the Pomodoro button:Īfter I press the Pomodoro button an additional appointment is created: While I put this on the backburner, fellow MVP Stale Hansen had been working on his own Pomodoro timer system using PowerShell and had cracked the Focus time challenge by utilising Power Automate to copy existing Focus time appointments and modify them at will. ![]() However, copying existing Focus time appointments would have the desired effect, so the challenge became how to automate that and integrate it with my app. While there are three attributes I could see (title, description, category), manually creating an appointment with these same settings would have no effect. The issue I had unfortunately was that the Focus time appointments that MyAnalytics creates (which trigger your presence in Microsoft Teams to change) are very specific, and I wasn’t able to replicate them manually. When this is activated, the presence in Microsoft Teams is changed to “Focusing” (an equivalent of Do Not Disturb) and the Action Center in Windows is set to “Focus assist” which effectively suppresses all notifications. The best way to do this in the Microsoft world is to use the MyAnalytics “ Focus plan” feature in Microsoft 365. One thing I wanted from the Pomodoro timer was for it to change my ability to receive notifications. Integration with Microsoft Teams and Windows 10 There is also the ability to cancel earlier, should the task be completed faster. It updates each minute, and at the end goes back to the main screen. When I press the Start Pomodoro button, the app shows a different canvas with a 25-minute countdown. I don’t necessarily use it exactly as designed but having the ability to challenge myself and ‘race the clock’ helps keep me focused when I can sometimes become easily distracted. I’ve really gotten into the Pomodoro technique as a way of being able to burn through a task with no distractions. In the column headings for Calendar and Tasks I’ve added some basic statistics to show how many appointments and tasks have been completed and how many remain. I added an icon to automatically display which of those the item is, so again at a glance I can tell what’s coming up.Īdditionally, I’ve added the location of the meeting so I can tell if it’s in-person or online.Īcross the day we have a lot of meetings and perform a lot of tasks, so I felt it was important to show that. Having a list of calendar items showing was good, but I couldn’t tell if they were an appointment (just me) or a meeting with other people. This is important because sometimes it’s easy to get hyperfocused and lose all track of time. ![]() As the day goes on, you see more of the background, kind of like a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.Īnother tweak was to have the app automatically refresh every 5 minutes so that any changes are updated without me having to worry about remembering to refresh.Īdditionally, I thought it important to put a large clock front and centre so that at a glance I could see where I was in the day. ![]() One small tweak was the addition of the Bing image of the day as the canvas background. However, you don’t need to have ADHD to benefit from them. Since the initial build of the app I’ve been working with Power Apps a lot more and have been comfortable enough to experiment and make some adjustments to the app.Īs I have ADHD, these adjustments were designed to go beyond giving me a clear view of my day, but also a clear view of right now. The original app showed my agenda for the day as well as any tasks due the day and any update / refresh needed to be done manually. Back then I simply couldn’t get my head around Power Apps sufficiently to build it myself. Just over a year ago I blogged about a Power App I had built that consolidated my calendar and tasks in the one view for improved at-a-glance visibility of what I had coming up for the day.įull credit where credit is due: when I say “I had built” – I mean fellow Microsoft MVP Rene Modery built for me and I made some minor adjustments.
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