I thought it might be fun to have a place to either whine or gloat about those moments when it feels like a TagTime ping’s timing was particularly unlucky or lucky.[1] And since it’s a universal ping schedule, it feels like there’s something communal about pings that might make doing so more fun for whatever reason.
[Yup, @dreev, I totally recognize that there’s nothing actually either lucky or unlucky about it, etc. etc.]
I’ll start:
Gee THANKS, TagTime. I’ve been working for over an hour but you caught me precisely during the 1/4 second I was picking up the empty water bottle I kicked over! Nooooooo!
(If there are enough of us doing this eventually, we might even want to make this a Twitter tag instead, but let’s get it started here for now to see if anyone else likes doing this other than me first!)
This is an interesting case study. I actually try to go by the snapshot of my mental state. So if I’m staring unseeingly at a Beeminder blog post draft but I’m blatantly daydreaming about sugarplumbs then I won’t count it as work, but if I’m picking up something I knocked off my desk, as long as I haven’t derailed my train of thought, then I’ll count it as work. Checking Twitter real quick though, even if it’s so quick that I don’t feel like I derailed what I was doing, if I’m pinged at that moment, then it’s not work.
When there’s genuine ambiguity about what my attention is focused on at the moment of the ping, I’ll randomize.
Ironically enough complaining about TagTime makes me want to try using TagTime again for the first time in a couple of years.
Regarding Daniel’s comment: yeah I used to get stuck in scruples anxiety loops over whether or not I was rationalizing what I was “really” doing during a ping. It helps hearing that I wouldn’t be entirely full of garbage to consider my focal point when a tag hits.