TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Tom’s Timer 5

8 years ago I made a little timer app to sit in my taskbar and track how long I’d worked or not-worked. I’ve used it pretty regularly ever since, and every now and then my need for some extra feature or tweak outweighs my laziness and I make a new version. I’ve just made v5.

TomsTimer5.exe
(v5, Windows, installer)

Here’s what it already did:

• Click Work or Break to start tracking time
• App’s name in the taskbar shows how long you’ve been at it

These days I mainly use it to track how long I worked each day, partly to keep an eye on productivity but mostly cos logging that work in my spreadsheet triggers a little dopamine hit of accomplishment I don’t get otherwise.

But I hit two issues I wanted to fix: firstly, I’d sometimes need to rush off while the work timer is going. I don’t have time to note down how long I’ve worked, so I don’t click the break button cos that’ll wipe the data. But if I’m away a while, now the data is wrong.

Secondly, sometimes I just forget to officially stop a work session, and the timer is ticking away while I’m not at my desk. Obviously I realise this has happened, but how long was I away?

Just generally, the timer wasn’t great if you ever failed to use it perfectly, and I saw a few ways it could be more helpful with that. So I added:

• Keeps a running total of all work sessions: means you can end a session without losing any data, and you can just log total time at the end of the day.
• Detects when you’re idle: if the mouse and keyboard haven’t done anything in more than 5 minutes, when they next move, the log notes how long you were idle. It doesn’t subtract this time or do anything with it, since it could be wrong, but it’s just useful info for you to have if you know you were away.
• Keeps a timestamped log of each time you start a session: useful for back-solving if you lose track of something, and generally good for clarity / not losing info.
• Optional stretch reminder pings every hour: I ought to be doing this, I don’t. There are other apps for this, but since I already have one that now has a sense of whether I’m at my computer, fits nicely here. It won’t ping if you’ve been idle for 30+ minutes, assumes you’re out of the room.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it’s made a certain sense of my timer, my spreadsheet, and various other coping mechanisms I’ve developed. It puts in a bracket with folks who have much more serious struggles than I do, and many symptoms I have no trace of. I tend to think diagnosis buckets like this aren’t worth bickering about, they’re just a means to finding treatment and strategies that work. I was having some memory and attention lapses, and I got some meds that help with that.

The timer helps too, as does the spreadsheet, and researching ADHD has helped me understand how to lean into that with other tools. It’s a wide family of symptoms, but a lot of it stems from the brain failing to provide enough of a reward for just doing the shit you need to do. A year ago I would have told you these tools were just about tracking my time and keeping an eye on productivity. Now I realise they’re also about helping to turn ‘I did what I was supposed to’ into ‘I feel good’.

I’ve since made myself a Trello-based to-do list that is obsessively focused on the aesthetics of hiding any daunting backlogs, making what’s on my plate look manageable, and keeping my accomplished tasks everpresent and cumulative. The aforementioned spreadsheet now turns daily chores into satifying box-checks, keeps running tallies of how I’m doing on many different metrics, and has a two-tiered system of weekly achievements to aim for. Nothing more I can share yet, but I’ll keep tinkering and report back if anything postable serves me as well as this timer has.

Here’s the original Timer post.

And I just noticed my tweets about each version aaalmost work as a version history, except the very first one isn’t in the thread. So for posterity: version 1, then versions 2 onwards.