Stopping early is showing up

There is a box in Untimer where the app speaks, under the heading, in the same place every time. When a session runs its length it says you focused for twenty five minutes. When you stop one after seven minutes it says nothing at all, and the glass goes quietly back to rest.

That silence took a while to arrive at. For a long time it said you showed up for seven minutes, and seven minutes went into the day’s total. It read well and it was wrong. A day of six sessions you had abandoned reported nearly three hours of focus, and the person reading it knew perfectly well he had not done nearly three hours of anything. A number that flatters you is the same kind of lie as a number that scolds you, and this one was worse, because it was the number you would go on to trust.

So a session you stopped counts for nothing. It stays out of the count, out of the minutes, out of the hours you work best and out of the run of days. It is a session that did not happen, and the app says nothing about it, because saying nothing is also how it avoids passing a verdict.

It is still on your record. The session is written, listed with its length and how it ended, and it comes out in your export. The record answers what happened; the figures answer what counted. Since the day this changed, those are two different questions.

What gets recorded

Each session keeps the length it was planned to be, the length it actually ran, how it ended, how many interruptions you noticed and whether they came from inside or outside, the task you named if you named one, and the time zone you were in. Nothing is rounded up to flatter you and nothing is rounded down to scold you. A forty second session is recorded as forty seconds.

Recording on its own does a lot. A review of behaviour change techniques by Michie and colleagues in 2009 found that keeping track of what you do is one of the most effective techniques there is, and that it works better still when you can see the record and look back at what you intended. So Untimer records, shows you, and lets you look back. Those three together are the point.

Why there are no streaks

Most apps that want you to come back use a streak, and a streak works by threat. Miss one day and the number you have been building resets. The app knows you will feel that reset more than you felt any of the days you kept it.

Untimer shows you something else. Forty one of the last forty five days. It is a count of the days you came back within a window, and the four days you did not are drawn exactly like the days you did. Nothing resets. You can see the rhythm of your returning without being punished for the shape of it.

The research on habits supports the gentler number. Lally and colleagues followed people forming everyday habits in 2010 and found that the time it took varied enormously from person to person, from a few weeks to most of a year, with a middle around two months. The same data suggested that missing a single day made little difference in the end. A missed day is ordinary.

Why there are no points

Untimer awards nothing. There is no experience, no level, no coins, no rank, no percentage of people who have done what you did. The reason is one of the most repeated findings in motivation research.

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 pattern was consistent: when the reward is expected and depends on doing the activity, people’s own motivation for the activity goes down. The thing they were paid to do becomes the thing they do for the pay. Feedback that simply told people something about what they had done 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 gives you information instead. How long, when, how it ended, what pulled you away. That is yours, and it costs you nothing to look at.

Milestones

Untimer does have milestones. Thirty two of them, in four groups: time recorded, coming back, how you work, and craft. They are kept because recognising something is different from paying for it, and because some of them say something worth hearing.

The one we most want you to see is called Came back. It appears when you return after more than a week away. Most apps would have spent that week sending you notifications about your dying streak. Untimer says nothing, and when you come back it notices, once, in the line at the end of your first session, and then keeps the mark where you can find it.

The milestones work like this. Where there is a number behind them, like sessions recorded, they form a ladder, and the card says the level you are at, the rung you reached, and what the next one is. A level says where you are on that ladder and nothing else: it is not earned, it is not spent, it is not compared with anyone, and it cannot go down. A milestone that describes something happening, like Came back or Wound again, is not on a ladder and only appears once it has happened. Showing your progress toward coming back would be showing your progress toward leaving. When one happens again, the card shows the latest time, and there is no count, because a count is a number you would feel you had to grow.

You cannot lose a milestone. The milestone for a run of days shows the longest run you have ever had, and that number only goes up.

The day you stop after seven minutes

So here is the bad day. You wind the glass. Seven minutes in, something gives, and you press Stop.

The sand pours back to the bottom, the spring settles, and the app says nothing. The set does not advance. No break is offered, because there is nothing to rest from and because the glass is one press away when you want to go again. Nothing on the screen has changed except the object, which is back where it started.

The one milestone that speaks to this is Wound again, and it appears when you stopped early and wound another one the same day. It is about the second one.

The day after, the app looks exactly the same as it did. No banner. No number in mourning. An empty glass with the sand at the bottom, waiting for you to hold it.

If a sentence in Untimer feels bad to read after a bad day, it is a bug. Tell us and we will rewrite it.