Article
Where you left off
An interruption does not end a session in Untimer. It is a tap, and a line about what it was. That line comes back to meet you when you return, and there is a study behind it.
Something always interrupts. A message, a colleague, a thought that arrives sideways and will not leave. Untimer does not treat an interruption as the end of the session. It treats it as something to notice.
While a session runs there is a button that says Interruption. Pressing it opens a small sheet with two questions on it, both optional. Was it something in your head or something around you. What was it, so you can pick it up later. Answer them or skip them, and you are back in the session inside five seconds. The session keeps running the whole time.
What you wrote comes back later, and that is the part worth explaining.
The note that meets you
The next time you open the timer, the box under the greeting holds that line before anything else it has to say: where you left off. It shows the last line you wrote and says when you wrote it. Yesterday. On Tuesday the twelfth. If it was today, it says nothing, because you were there.
It never expires. A note from last week is still true, and a cutoff that quietly dropped it would drop it on the one morning you most needed it. You dismiss it when you have read it, and the next interruption writes a new one.
That is the whole feature. A line in, a line out. It is also the part of Untimer with the clearest study behind it.
Attention residue
In 2009 Sophie Leroy described something anyone who has been interrupted will recognise. When you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays on the first one, and it stays more stubbornly when the first task was left unfinished. She called it attention residue. It shows up as worse performance on the second task while your mind keeps going back to the first.
In 2018 Leroy and Glomb tested a remedy across several studies. Before switching, people spent a moment writing a short plan for the interrupted task: where they were, what they would do next, what stood in the way. They called it a ready to resume plan. People who wrote one carried less residue into the next task and did better on it. The plan did not need to be long. It needed to exist.
That is what the interruption sheet is. What was it. The one line Untimer asks for is the shortest form of the plan that was tested, written at the moment of leaving, and the line that meets you when you return is the plan being handed back.
Inside and outside
The sheet asks one more thing: whether the interruption came from inside or outside. Something around you is the phone, the door, the person. Something in your head is the sudden need to check one thing, the thought about dinner, the better idea for a different project.
Untimer never calls either of them a distraction, because that word is a judgement about you. An interruption is an event. You noticed it, which is the whole trick, and the record keeps the count and the kind. That is information, and what you do with it is yours.
What the record keeps
A session with interruptions is still a session. The line at the end says how many you noticed. Your days say which kind they were, so a week later you can see whether your mornings are full of the outside kind or the inside kind. After fifty of them, noticed and written down, you get a milestone called Noticed it, because noticing is the skill and everything else follows from it.
The record does not hold the interruption against the session. The session ended when you ended it, or when the sand ran out, and its outcome is whichever of those happened. An interrupted session that ran its length counts in full.
Why it is small
You might expect a product built around this to make more of it. A journal, a list of open loops, a review screen. We considered all of them and built none of them, for the reason the study gives: the plan works because it is brief and because it is written at the moment of leaving. A journal is something you do instead of working. A line is something you do on the way back to it.
So the sheet has two questions, the return has one line, and the whole exchange takes less time than reading this paragraph. Hello Untimer. What was it?