As I’ve written before, I use the Pomodoro technique as much as possible when I want to get work done. While the timer ticks down from 25 minutes I usually need some kind of white or dark noise in order not to get distracted by my environment. At first, I was using the Bear Focus Timer’s built-in rain noise before moving over to Forest when BFT broken (and before it was fixed) with iOS 13.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I listened to the Automators podcast where Rosemary Orchard and David Sparks interviewed Charlie Chapman about his app “Dark Noise”. At the point of writing this, the app comes with 40 distinct sounds ranging from generic white, pink, brown, and grey noises over classics like heavy rain all the way to the sounds of keyboards (just in case you miss that particular sound from your office).
But what sets Dark Noise apart is that it allows you to integrate it extensively into iOS shortcuts. For instance: I have a shortcut called “Pomodoro” which I’ve been using the last week or two. It starts a 25-minutes timer and Dark Noise in the background playing “Pink Noise” with a timer for 25 minutes. This way, not only is the alarm triggered after 25 minutes but also Dark Noise stops (see the screenshot for details).
Additionally, there are a couple of beta features that allow you to mix and match sounds but I haven’t used that yet. For € 4.49 it’s definitely not the cheapest white-noise app out there, but I do not regret getting it. It does one job and that brilliantly!
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂