I hacked my clock to control my focus

I've added an hourly chime to my work computer's clock, similar to a Casio wristwatch. It's a subtle reminder of the passing time, prompting me to pause, reflect, and reassess my actions to stay on track and avoid procrastination.

I like this constant on screen reminder though and might give it a try myself :)

I built a simple SwiftUI/Swift Data app to do the same thing across my Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Desktop.

With the heavy lifting of SwiftUI/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.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Language files blank comment code

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XML 13 0 0 579

Swift 19 131 142 548

JSON 4 0 0 115

YAML 1 7 0 43

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUM: 37 138 142 1285

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If you live in the apple ecosystem and want to make a simple tool for yourself, you really should go ahead and do that.

It started as a desire to have a "focus" 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't yet tried it on tvOS).

I'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.

And I'm not going to open source it, because it is ~500 loc, with no libraries plus a bunch of Xcode generated stuff.

Someone working mainly in a terminal could hack this into Basta.

https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/basta/about/

The stock Basta puts a clock (date + time) into a scroll-protected status line, host name and current working dir.

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't change, though. :)

A timer is one of the most underrated ways to stay focused.[1]

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.

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.

For distractions (that seem important and sometimes are) while I'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.

Once you are good with a process/pattern, whatever tool you build/buy/use, as a timer in this case, helps your focus on your current situation.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2023/timer/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/watch-tiny-handy-computer/

This is neat. Low cost, built from stolen parts. 10/10 engineering.

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.

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 :)

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

is there something similar for macOS?