Something close at hand

There is a thing many Untimers know about themselves and find hard to explain to people who do not. They can play a game for four hours without noticing the time, and they cannot start a report that is due in three weeks. It is the same person, the same afternoon, the same amount of attention. What is different is the distance to the reward.

The game tells you how you are doing every few seconds. The report tells you nothing until it is marked, weeks from now, by someone else. Steel’s 2007 review of the research on procrastination found the distance to the outcome to be one of the strongest predictors of putting a thing off, and studies of ADHD suggest that pull across a distance is weaker still. The report is no more boring than the game. It is further away.

Something close at hand

Milestones are Untimer’s answer to that distance. They put something to aim for within reach of the next session, and they say what you have done so far in a form you can look at.

They are ladders with levels. Sessions recorded runs from ten to ten thousand in seven rungs. Days in a row runs from a week to a year. There are ladders for the days of the last year, for sessions in one day, for breaks taken, full sets, interruptions noticed, tasks finished and estimates you went back and changed. Each one says the level you are on, the rung you reached and the date you reached it, and what is next, with the count on the way there: 1,056 of 2,500 so far.

Beside the ladders are the marks that only appear once they happen. Came back, when you were away a while and you returned. Wound again, when you stopped early and started another the same day. Early start, Late finish, Whole clock. Knows when to stop, for a long break taken to its end after a full set. They are kept off the screen until they happen, because a list of things you have not done is a list of things you have not done, and nobody needs one.

Two of them say something about the whole design. Wound again is a mark for a day that went badly and was picked up again. Came back is a mark for a gap. Most systems punish both.

The honest part

Here is the research that shaped how the ladders work, and it points the other way from what you might expect.

In 1999 Deci, Koestner and Ryan pulled together more than a hundred experiments on what happens to people’s own interest in an activity when a reward is attached to it. The finding held across them: when a reward is expected and depends on doing the activity, people’s own motivation for it goes down. They start doing the thing for the reward, and when the reward stops, so do they. Plain information about what someone had done, with no payment attached, did not have that effect.

A focus timer that pays you in points for focusing is arranging exactly the condition that wears down your own reason to focus. So Untimer pays you nothing. There are no points, no experience, no coins, no rank, no percentage of people who have done what you did. A milestone is information: this many sessions, this many days, this date. A level is a position on a ladder, and it cannot be spent.

And nothing can be lost. There is no streak that resets and no level that decays. A mark you reached is yours for as long as you keep the account, whether or not you have Plus.

Why it still works

If milestones pay nothing, why have them? Because the problem was distance, and information solves distance. A count that moves every session gives the far away goal a near edge. You are not doing this for the mark. You are doing it because the mark lets you see that the thing you are doing is adding up, which the report at three weeks’ distance never lets you see.

Lally and colleagues, following people forming everyday habits in 2010, found that the time it took varied enormously between people and that missing a single day made little difference in the end. A ladder that counts days with a session on them, and a mark for coming back after a gap, are built for exactly that finding. The day you missed is ordinary. The day you came back is the one that gets a mark.

There is a smaller reason too. Looking at the ladder is pleasant, and that is allowed. The founder has a thousand sessions of his own and knows the date he reached them, and it does something to be told that plainly by a thing that has no reason to flatter him.

What Plus changes

Every mark you reach is free and stays yours. Plus shows the ladder ahead of you: the rungs you have not reached, the count on the way to each, and the whole catalogue of fifty four. That is the part that gives the far goal its near edge, and it is the part that is paid for.