Especially when writing is your day job, it’s easy to have this image of sitting in front of your screen, typing away all day long. I don’t know about you, but my brain can’t focus that long without falling out.

With a bit of experimenting, I found out that I can focus the best when I write in bursts of about thirty minutes. An hour is too long, twenty minutes too short; I don’t want to stop while I’m in the zone. Using the stopwatch on my phone doesn’t really do it for me, so I scoured the glorious world of apps, which is more like a maze. There’s so much choice. However, I did find two apps that I really liked.

One is called 30-30 and starts a countdown of thirty minutes with the heading WORK, and then immediately after that counts down another thirty minutes for your BREAK. It’s actually really nice that the break also gets timed, because, let’s face it, it’s easy to get sucked up into the world of fun cat videos. Before you know it, it’s the year 3229.

The other one is called Focus Time, and it has a nice interface. The timer counts down similarly to the 30-30 app, but this one comes with awesome background noises. You can also count down in two different ways and set tasks for certain days that you can then cross off.

I find that I’m way more productive and don’t procrastinate when I set this timer for only thirty minutes. Obviously, you can find out what works for you. Maybe you prefer regular bursts of ten minutes. Find what works for you.