| I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing. I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either. The app creates a thin, always visible line at the bottom of my screen that shrinks inwards as time passes, at the end of the allotted time the screen will blur preventing me from doing whatever I was doing and snapping me out of my hyperfocus state. I can choose how long the timer runs for and how long the screen blurs for. Tonight I added a loop feature so I can use it like a pomodoro timer with enforced breaks. It's a simple menu bar app for MacOS and could be better, but it does what I want it to do. I've been using it for the past week and found it really helpful. I haven't used Swift before so it was a good learning experience too. It's the same principle as a Time Timer (timetimer.com) which I used previously but I find my app works better as the screen blur actually prevents me from just continuing whatever I'm doing, and the bar is always in my line of sight. |
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274782#38276107 (125+ subcomments circa 2023)
> your brain will try to sync with the light that you can barely see, calming you down and allowing you to go focus-mode with the task in ha[n]d