我做了一个不会忘记设置的计时器

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Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have.

Sure, I was doing a lot of stuff. But I wasn’t pausing to ask whether I was doing the right stuff. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it. My fingers were moving but I wasn’t really thinking.

So I needed a reliable way to interrupt my “unproductive productivity” and actually think. The obvious solution was a timer.

Unfortunately, if you use timers a lot, you learn to dismiss them reflexively. And it’s really easy to forget to set the next timer. A week later, I’d realize: “Hey, that timer idea really worked, I should get back to that.” And then I didn’t.

So I built a new kind of timer. It does 2 unique things:

1. It asks what I’ll focus on.
2. It gradually blurs my screen if I don’t set a new timer.

When it asks “What will you focus on?” I answer in a word or two, start the next timer, and keep working. Having to name my intention keeps me fully aware of my trajectory. If I’m in danger of drifting, it’s obvious. And if I avoid thinking for long enough, my screen starts getting harder to see.

If I’m making great progress on something that doesn’t require much thinking, I can set the timer for a longer duration, maybe 30 minutes. But if I’m working on something more open-ended, I might tighten the leash all the way down to 3 minutes. Then I can’t get off track.

Unlike a regular timer, I can’t fail to set the next one. If I don’t answer it promptly, the screen gradually becomes less readable until I do. If I wanted to avoid answering, I’d have to make a conscious decision to close the app. I’d have to decide to be less productive. I never do.

This small intervention has worked beautifully. Not only am I catching unproductive divergences earlier, I’m noticing fewer of them over time. It seems to be training me to do more and better thinking.

It’s not a replacement for a journal. I love journaling, but that takes more than a few seconds, and there’s a lot of benefit to reflecting more frequently.

If you’re running macOS, Intention is available here. I use it every day, and I think it’s the superior way of working.

Process

Tools like Cursor and Claude Code have dramatically changed the way I approach the design process.

In the past, I would have sketched some potential solutions, put together a clickable prototype, and user tested that. But how much does that user test actually test? A traditional prototype in Figma or the like is paper-thin. I’m testing much less than the full experience.

Now I can sculpt functional software as I go. That means I can build something, really use it, notice opportunities to make it better, and implement the changes I’d like to see, all in the same working session. This fast and robust feedback loop means better software.

That said, sketches are still faster. I’ll bounce back and forth between sketching and building as appropriate.

It’s far more practical to draw usable imagery than to generate it. The dock icon is drawn by hand in Figma with the pen tool and layer effects. The candle in the dark serves as both a metaphor for the app’s purpose illuminating the way forward, and an allusion to meditative practice.

Why does this menu bar application appear in the dock? The answer is in the riddle of keyboard focus. An app that steals my keyboard focus every 3 minutes would be impossible to use, so instead the appearance of the timer window in the top right of the screen gently reminds me, and the gradual blurring of the screen gets more insistent over time. But the app does not take keyboard focus itself. This balance is what makes the app work. So I need a fast and intuitive way to switch to the timer window when I’m ready. Cmd+Tab has to work, and having the app appear in the dock enables that.

Inspiration

The visual inspiration for the branding is the early 1600s Caravaggio painting Saint Jerome Writing. The aging scholar Jerome, remembering the nearness of death, absorbs himself completely in the most noble work he can find to do while ignoring everything else. This is our task.

I’m available for new projects! I’m a designer with a development background and product management experience, so I can own a product from concept to execution and ship fast. Tell me what you’re working on!