It's a work sampling timer. When it goes off, you record what you were doing.[1][2] After a few days or weeks, a pattern of how much time is spent doing what appears. It's a management idea that never really caught on, because it's so annoying. Probably saleable as an app today, with a cloud-hosted back end.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC225293/pdf/mlab00085-0043.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC225293/pdf/mlab...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.hca.wa.gov/assets/billers-and-providers/participant-quick-reference-guide.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.hca.wa.gov/assets/billers-and-providers/particip...</a>
I have seen something like this as a safety mechanism. It fires and you are supposed to either check in or verify something that is critical to life. The randomness is to ensure that psychologically the alarm is not ignored or becomes habit to respond to.<p>Not positive if this is the same though.
I wonder how well this would keep me/someone from accidentally hyperfocusing-from experience, a 10 minute repeating timer helps <i>somewhat</i>, but I have always been curious about a random length timer instead.
Does anyone happen to know an iOS app that does something like this? Preferably with configurable upper and lower bound for the random interval, and maybe times of day when it should be active, and/or a settable timer when it should stop being active.
I've been using grandfather clocks ticking sound to help me focus on the laptop on a noisy environment.<p>Would find it funny to see IBM had an official tool to help people focus, but for now I'll assume it's for random sampling of something.
Similar to a dead man switch. You acknowledge the device on random intervals. Failure to acknowledge the device means the person is presumably incapacitated, so the heavy vehicle/machine they are supposed to be operating (train, boat, forklift whatever) automatically comes to a halt.<p>This seems conceptually similar but without being part of a fail safe mechanism.