In the Discord, @theospears called it calorie counting for time management. My understanding of the idea is that maybe there’s a fixed fraction of your workday – say 3/4 – that you realistically can stay focused. If so, you can use an adaptive algorithm to hit that fraction like so:
Start a timer and start working
Whenever you get distracted or otherwise want a break, stop the timer
Start a countdown timer for your break set to 1/3 as much time as however long you worked
Start working again when that timer goes off
(Or if you want to start working earlier, save your unused break time to add to your next break)
Rinse, repeat, finish the day having spent 3/4 of your time focused and the other 1/4 on breaks
Part of the appeal is that it’s more flexible than pomodoros (or tocking, as we call it). If you’re on a roll you shouldn’t stop working. And vice versa: don’t force it if you can’t stay focused. Maybe it also helps with activation energy? When you start your work day you’re not committing to any fixed amount of time for the first time block.
PS: I would like to thank Beeminder for making me move this from Discord (and beemails) to the forum for posterity.
PPS: Link previews of graphs should be much better here in the forum now:
Oh god, “implementation” is a stretch, I totally forgot I had vibe coded that with absolutely no programming knowledge before I had even learned about the idea of software testing and setting up test cases.
I was using o1 on a lark and kept finding slight regressions whenever I wanted to implement another user story and hadn’t even thought thru all of the user stories needed to confirm the product works as expected. Oh well. I could do a better approach now, but proceed with using my implementation with caution since I never actually wrote user stories. My exploratory testing seemed to show it working fine, though. It’s open source (not sure if I had set a license, did not consider myself a developer at the time) so feel free to fork / clone the repo and use that as a foundation for something better. Flattered, Dreeves, but
There’s some fiddly bits I never got around to fixing since it hit “good enough for my own use” pretty quick, but if you have any issues definitely let me know - 1.1.1 · Robert Perce / Third Time · GitLab
I made that one for iOS and still use it when I’m feeling particularly scattered, but I still haven’t figured out the alarm problem.
iOS timers can end with loud, noisy alarms, but apps don’t seem to have a way to trigger them. They can make notifications, but not ones that are obtrusive enough to get my attention. Time Stream has this problem too. If I get distracted, I’ll come back to a phone with half a dozen reminders about my routines, none of which worked.
I get around it by manually setting timers with Siri, but it’s tedious.
This is why I ended up never beeminding the “deficit”.
