Article
A day in pieces
Untimer cuts a working day into pieces of twenty five minutes that are all the same size. Here is what changes when you count your day in pieces instead of guessing at it in hours.
Ask someone how long a piece of work took and you get an answer in hours, and the answer is usually wrong, for an honest reason. Nobody experiences an hour. You experience an afternoon with a phone in it, a morning that went somewhere, a stretch that felt like ten minutes and took two hours. The number gets made up afterwards, and it flatters or scolds depending on the day.
Untimer counts a day differently. A day is a number of pieces, every piece is twenty five minutes, and every piece either ran its length or it did not. That is the whole system, and this is about what changes when you use it.
A piece is always the same size
The pieces are all the same length, and the length cannot be changed. That is the part people ask about most, and it is the part that makes the rest work. Why twenty five minutes is honest about the number itself.
When every piece is the same size, a count means something. Three pieces on the draft this morning means the same thing as three pieces on the draft in March, and the same thing as three pieces on somebody else’s draft. You can compare a Tuesday with a Thursday. You can look at a task that took nine pieces and know what nine means. An hour of focus is a guess. A piece is a measurement, and it is the same measurement every time.
The founder kept his sessions at twenty five minutes for years in a timer that would have let him change it in a second, and he never did, and his record is readable end to end because of it.
Inside a piece
A piece begins when you wind the glass and let go. From then on the sand falls and the number counts down, and the controls are Interruption, Reset and Stop.
An interruption does not end the piece. Something pulls at you, from inside or from outside, you tap once, you can write a line about what it was, and you go back. The piece is still one piece. The interruption is counted, the line comes back to meet you next time, and nothing is marked against you. Where you left off is about that line.
If you stop the piece, it counts for nothing. It is on your record, and it adds nothing to the day. A piece that ran its length is drawn as one small hourglass, and a piece that did not run its length is left out of the drawing. That is the rule that keeps the count honest: the day shows what ran, and only what ran.
A set, and a break
Four pieces make a set. After each of the first three there is a break of five minutes, and after the fourth a long break of twenty five, which is the same length as a piece. That is the object itself: two chambers of the same size with a neck between them.
A break is the most it takes. End the break stops one the moment you have had enough, and counts nothing against you. Nothing starts by itself. The break waits for you, and so does the next piece.
Biwer and colleagues found in 2023 that people got the same amount done with fixed breaks as with breaks they chose themselves, and felt more concentrated and less tired with the fixed ones. The exact numbers did not matter in their study, and they do not matter here. What matters is that the decision is made once, by the instrument, and never by you at half past two.
Estimating in pieces
A task in Untimer is optional, and when you make one you say how many pieces you think it will take. That guess is the interesting number. When you finish the task, Untimer keeps what you said beside what it took, and draws the difference plainly: a row of dots, and past a hairline, the pieces you did not see coming.
This is where counting in pieces earns its keep. You cannot estimate in hours, because you have never experienced one. You can estimate in pieces, because you have sat through hundreds of them, and after a few weeks your guesses get better. The record says so. The founder’s own guesses were out by about half for the first month, and then they were close, and they have stayed close.
What changes
After a few weeks of days in pieces, the day is a different shape.
You stop asking how long something takes and start counting how many pieces it took, which is a question you can answer. The day has a shape, and it is drawn: the pieces stand on it at the time they happened, and the gaps are the time you were not focusing. A long task looks like a number of pieces instead of a cliff. And a bad day is a small number, which describes it without judging it.
The founder’s record is several thousand pieces long. He can tell you what a week of his looks like, when his days begin and end, what pulls at him most, and how many pieces a rough cut takes. He could not have told you any of that in hours.