Article
How Untimer counts a day
Untimer counts a day in sessions of twenty five minutes that are all the same size. This is what a session records, how the day is drawn and what changes when a day is counted in sessions instead of guessed at in hours.
Ask someone how long a piece of work took and you get an answer in hours, and the answer is usually wrong. An hour is a thing people measure and hardly ever feel. What you feel is an afternoon with a phone in it, a morning that went somewhere, a stretch that seemed like ten minutes and took two hours. The number gets made up afterwards, and it comes out generous or harsh depending on the day.
Untimer counts a day differently. A day is a number of sessions, every session is twenty five minutes, and every session either ran its length or it did not. This article is about what changes when a day is counted that way.
Every session is the same size
The sessions are all the same length, and none of the lengths can be changed. That is the part people ask about most, and it is the part that makes the rest work. Why every session is twenty five minutes covers the number itself.
When every session is the same size, a count means something. Three sessions on the draft this morning mean the same thing as three sessions on the draft in March, and the same thing as three sessions on somebody else’s draft. You can compare a Tuesday with a Thursday. You can look at a task that took nine sessions and know what nine means. An hour of focus is a guess. A session is a measurement, and it is the same measurement on any day.
The founder kept his sessions at twenty five minutes for years in a timer that would have let him change the length in a second, and he left it alone, and his record is readable end to end because of it.
Inside a session
A session begins when you wind the hourglass up and let go. From then on the sand falls and the time left counts down, and the controls are Interruption, Reset and Stop.
An interruption leaves the session intact. Something pulls at you, from inside or from outside. You press Interruption, choose Something in my head or Something around me, and write a line about what it was if you like. The session stays whole and counts in full. The interruption is counted, the line comes back in the message box under Where you left off, and the day’s count holds where it was. How Untimer handles interruptions describes it.
What counts
A session counts when it runs its full twenty five minutes. If you stop a session, it stays on the record and adds no time to the day. A session that ran its length is drawn as one small hourglass, and a session that stopped short is left out of the drawing, the hours and every other figure. That is the rule that keeps the count honest. The day shows what ran.
What a session records
Each session records its planned length, how long it ran and how it ended. It records the task you named, if any. It also records how many interruptions you noticed and whether each one came from inside or from outside.
A session belongs to the day it started in, in your time zone. A session that starts at 23:50 and ends at 00:15 counts for the first day.
Sets and breaks
Four sessions make a set. After each of the first three sessions the app offers a break of five minutes, and after the fourth it offers a long break of twenty five minutes, which is the same length as a session. That is the hourglass itself: two chambers of the same size with a neck between them.
A break starts when you press its button. End the break stops one the moment you have had enough, and the record stays as it was. The break waits for you to start it, and so does the next session.
Biwer and colleagues found in 2023 that people got the same amount done with fixed breaks as with breaks they chose themselves, and that they felt more concentrated and less tired with the fixed ones. The structure is what made the difference. Untimer makes that decision once, so it is not left to you at half past two.
Estimating in sessions
A task in Untimer is optional, and when you make one you give it a name and say how many sessions you think it will take, from one to six. Sessions you run while the task is selected count against it. That guess is the interesting number.
The task card shows how far along the task is, for example 2 of 4 so far, with one dot for each session you estimated. When you finish the task, Untimer keeps what you said beside what it took and draws the difference plainly. The card reads Said 4, took 6, and the sessions you did not see coming are drawn after a line. With Plus, the Sessions by task panel in Insights lists every finished task the same way.
This is where counting in sessions earns its keep. Estimating in hours goes badly, because an hour is a unit you measure and rarely feel. Estimating in sessions goes better, because you have sat through hundreds of them, and after a few weeks your guesses improve. The record says so. The founder’s own guesses were out by about half for the first month, and then they were close, and they have stayed close.
How the day looks
Under the controls on the Timer screen, one small hourglass stands for each session that ran today. A line under them gives the count and the focused time. Press the line to see today by task, with the interruptions for each task.
At the bottom of the screen a strip draws today from midnight to midnight. The day has a shape: each session stands at the time it ran, and the gaps are the time you were not focusing. A sun marks the current time. A flag marks the end of the working day if you set one in Settings. Insights draws an earlier day the same way when you open it.
Active days
Active days in Insights counts how many of the last forty five days had at least one session. It also shows your current run of days in a row and your longest run.
In 2010 Lally and colleagues followed people forming everyday habits and found that missing a single day made little difference in the end. If you miss a day, the days around it still count.
What changes
After a few weeks of counting in sessions, the day is a different shape. You stop asking how long something takes and start counting how many sessions it took, which is a question you can answer. A long task looks like a number of sessions, and a number of sessions is easier to face than a block of hours. And a bad day is a small number, which describes it without judging it.
The founder’s record is several thousand sessions long. He can tell you what a week of his looks like and when his days begin and end. He can tell you what pulls at him most, and how many sessions a rough cut takes. He could not have told you any of that in hours.