I hacked my clock to control my focus

talking about focus hacks…when at uni I had odd studying hours, often mixing day and night without any clear distinction.<p>What kept me grounded were scented candles. IKEA used to sell those with an expected burning time. My favs were the 40hrs ones [0]. My exam preparation was 1 candle for revising notes, 1 candle to go through relevant books and 1-2 candles to do exercises (exp for calculus and similar courses). Add 1 more for the final revision. I was constantly lighting on and off those.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ikea.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;p&#x2F;jaemlik-scented-candle-in-glass-vanilla-light-beige-70502178&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ikea.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;p&#x2F;jaemlik-scented-candle-in-glass...</a>

I&#x27;ve added an hourly chime to my work computer&#x27;s clock, similar to a Casio wristwatch. It&#x27;s a subtle reminder of the passing time, prompting me to pause, reflect, and reassess my actions to stay on track and avoid procrastination.<p>I like this constant on screen reminder though and might give it a try myself :)

A timer is one of the most underrated ways to stay focused.[1]<p>We have all been there where you are supposed to work on that boring but critical bug for the project, where a few other team members are waiting, but you end up booking a domain, building a landing page, and launching a waiting list. By dinner, as you are talking to potential alpha users in your community and start spreading the word, you realize you have not touched that bug.<p>Anyway, I like timers; the only complication in my Watch is a timer.[2] At my desk, I use a physical hourglass regularly. The physical hourglass helps me not be constrained by the Pomodoro-ish restrictions and work past the finish line.<p>For distractions (that seem important and sometimes are) while I&#x27;m on a specific task, I usually have my handy notebook, and I write them down quickly with a pen so I can return to them later. That helps me prevent launching ideas into landing pages.<p>Once you are good with a process&#x2F;pattern, whatever tool you build&#x2F;buy&#x2F;use, as a timer in this case, helps your focus on your current situation.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;timer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;timer&#x2F;</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;watch-tiny-handy-computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;watch-tiny-handy-computer&#x2F;</a>

This is neat. Low cost, built from stolen parts. 10&#x2F;10 engineering.

I spend all my time in Emacs so I implemented a similar thing there. Been using it for, hmm.. a decade now?<p>Org-mode includes clock in&#x2F;out features and can display this in either the modeline or frame title (or both). I did the frame title because it&#x27;s basically unused space otherwise.<p>I used to use this in conjunction with the Pomodoro method. I don&#x27;t need to use that these days, though.<p>I can easily add a task to any project, or the currently active one, without breaking my flow at any time. I recently added an &quot;immediate&quot; task that will instantly clock me in for those things that randomly come up during the day.<p>The nice thing is I get a complete breakdown of how all my time was spent during the week. I need to report on this for current job so it&#x27;s a win&#x2F;win.<p>This is also a good example of why I use Emacs. I hacked this together in a few minutes and been using and building on it for years.

On macOS there is xBar (haven&#x27;t tried it) and SwiftBar [1]<p>Its really cool because it lets you use any shell-executable file, including bash scripts, python scripts (with shebangs and made executable), as a menu bar tool. The standard output is expected to follow a very simple structure and will be used to create the menu bar tool&#x27;s text&#x2F;icon. You can have your scripts simply output emoji as well!<p>Not just that, but any output after a `---` will be treated as drop down options, and depending on format, those can contain info, or be exectuable actions.<p>Verrrry useful for all sorts of things.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;swiftbar&#x2F;SwiftBar">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;swiftbar&#x2F;SwiftBar</a>

I use a chess clock, hitting the rocker whenever I get up from my desk, or otherwise interrupted. It’s been useful for quantifying how much time is lost during the day and allow me to “bank” time should I need to step away for a bit.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leaptimer.com&#x2F;26.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leaptimer.com&#x2F;26.html</a>

Clever.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be about focus, any &quot;constant reminder&quot; could go there. For example &quot;give back that pen&quot;, &quot;unload the washing machine&quot;, &quot;call mom&quot; or whatever needs be done as soon as possible without requiring your immediate attention.

I built a simple SwiftUI&#x2F;Swift Data app to do the same thing across my Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Desktop.<p>With the heavy lifting of SwiftUI&#x2F;Swift Data, and iCloud providing automatic and private syncing, this is the cloc output for my project, (including widgets and all of the code and projects needed to target all of these platforms.)<p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>Language files blank comment code<p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>XML 13 0 0 579<p>Swift 19 131 142 548<p>JSON 4 0 0 115<p>YAML 1 7 0 43<p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>SUM: 37 138 142 1285<p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>If you live in the apple ecosystem and want to make a simple tool for yourself, you really should go ahead and do that.<p>It started as a desire to have a &quot;focus&quot; on my Apple Watch at all times, and in less than 10 hours, I have widgets, shortcuts (and Siri) integrations, and syncing across every apple platform (although I haven&#x27;t yet tried it on tvOS).<p>I&#x27;ve thought about productizing it, and I might one day, but that would add orders of magnitude to the time of making this something that people should be asked to pay for.<p>And I&#x27;m not going to open source it, because it is ~500 loc, with no libraries plus a bunch of Xcode generated stuff.

i bought a 30min hourglass. i wanted to do something like this but i can&#x27;t be adding more buzzing, pinging, alerting things to my digital life.

Someone working mainly in a terminal could hack this into Basta.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kylheku.com&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;basta&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kylheku.com&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;basta&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a><p>The stock Basta puts a clock (date + time) into a scroll-protected status line, host name and current working dir.<p>Basta works fine on MacOS, but you need to get a more recent build of Bash from somewhere (Homebrew ...). I should attempt a Zsh port one of these days; the name wouldn&#x27;t change, though. :)

I like how it doesn&#x27;t try to reinvent the wheel with some clunky productivity tool, just quietly enhances something you already glance at a hundred times a day

Good idea, thanks for sharing. Happy to see fellow linux users modifying their system to improve productivity.

I like to set timers. I use the taskbar timer in xfce to set it to say 30mins, and then I work on getting something done in that time. It works really well. Not sure if this has a common name.<p>This was really helpful when I redid the FastComments admin area, as that was a big slog of UI work that I quickly got tired of. This was before Claude :)

There’s similar app for Mac OS, Focus Bar <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;focusbar&#x2F;id443439127?mt=12">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;focusbar&#x2F;id443439127?mt=12</a>

Super cool hack.<p>For something slightly less hacky, check out the Argos gnome shell extension. It creates a folder where any script dropped there will get executed every N seconds, and the output placed on the title bar.<p>It’s been life-changing.

This kind of stuff makes me understand why people like Linux.

Has anyone created a similar solution for KDE plasma?<p>There&#x27;s a focus-plasmoid (pomodoro timer), but that one doesn&#x27;t display text.

On dwm:<p><pre><code> xsetroot -name &quot;$(date +&#x27;%b %d %H:%M&#x27;) Focus: $FOCUS&quot;</code></pre>

I actually just use conky widget with clock that overlays on top of my windows.

is there something similar for macOS?

I suppose you could do this in Tasker on Android with a Scene at Y=0.<p>I&#x27;m curious whether it works though. When I try these kinds of things, my eyes ignore it after a day or two. All productivity hacks have lifespans but I find that reminder&#x2F;annoyance-based ones fade very quickly.

Thank you. This is perfection.

<i>Very cool</i>