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 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