Article
Why starting work is hard
Most of what gets called procrastination is a starting problem. Untimer makes the start small, gives it weight with a hold of the hourglass and makes it cheap to walk away from, and here is why each of those matters.
There is a version of procrastination that looks like laziness to anyone watching and feels like something else to the person in it. The work is known, the afternoon is free and the person wants it done. They open the file and close it, make a coffee and read something, and at four o’clock they have done everything except the work.
The founder of Untimer edits video for a living and has spent years in that afternoon. What he noticed, and what the research says too, is that the trouble sits in the first minute of the work. Once the edit is open and the first cut is made, the next two hours look after themselves. Getting to the first cut is the hard part.
What the research found
In 2007 Steel reviewed the research on procrastination. People put a task off more when its reward is far away and the task is unpleasant, and people who act on impulse put things off more. The distance to the reward was one of the strongest predictors. A report due in three weeks has almost no pull today, and the pull grows as the deadline gets close, which is why the night before is when it finally gets done.
In 2013 Sirois and Pychyl reviewed the research and described procrastination as a way of repairing mood in the short term. A task that makes people feel bad gets replaced by something that feels better, at the cost of feeling worse later. That is why telling yourself to try harder does little. The effort is already there, and what is being avoided is a feeling that sits in the first minute.
In 2006 Gollwitzer and Sheeran combined ninety four tests with more than eight thousand participants. Planning when and where you will act helped people start, and the effect was strongest for starting a goal.
This research is about people, and it explains why a timer can help: a timer changes the size of the first minute.
What Untimer does about starting
Session length
Untimer makes the thing you are starting small. What you start is twenty five minutes, and the whole report waits behind that. Twenty five minutes is small enough to agree to on a bad afternoon, and it is the same length every session, so the negotiation is over before it begins. Untimer chooses the length for you, because deciding how long to work is one more place to stall. Keeping the start small does most of the work.
People who plan when and where they will act are much more likely to do it than people who merely mean to. The plan turns a vague intention into a moment, and a session is that moment: this, now, for twenty five minutes. Why every session is twenty five minutes has the details.
Naming the task
You can name the task before you start and say how many sessions you think it will take. The name is saved with the session.
The hold
Hold the hourglass for two and a half seconds to wind it up. The session starts when you let go. A spring winds while you hold and a ratchet clicks as it goes, and letting go early unwinds the hourglass and sets it back to rest.
Two and a half seconds is short. It is long enough to notice that you have begun, and that turns out to matter. A click is something you do while you are still deciding. A wind is something you do because you decided. It gives the beginning a little weight, and it puts a small physical act between the not doing and the doing. It makes starting something you decide to do, and that is what it is for. Why you hold the hourglass to start a session says the rest.
Stopping
A session you start in Untimer can be stopped at any moment. When you stop one, the hourglass goes back to rest, a soft low note plays if sound is on and the message box stays quiet about it. The screen carries on as it was. The session is on the record with its length and how it ended, and it adds no time to the day.
That matters for starting more than it seems to. Part of what makes the first minute expensive is the sense of signing up for the whole afternoon. If stopping is free, starting is cheaper. Most of the time you will carry on, because the hard part was the minute you just got through. Sometimes you will stop, and then you will wind the hourglass up again ten minutes later, and the Started again milestone appears for exactly that. Stopping a session early describes what Stop does.
A bad day
Here is the founder’s own bad day. The edit is open and he does not want to be in it. He holds the hourglass, because holding is something he can do without wanting to, and lets go. For a few minutes he does the smallest edit there is. Somewhere around minute eight he is in it, and the bell at twenty five is a surprise. He takes the break and winds the hourglass up again.
On a worse day he stops at minute six, and the app lets it pass. He makes the coffee. At some point he holds the hourglass again.
The record afterwards shows the sessions that ran, drawn as small hourglasses on the day, and leaves out the one that stopped short. It describes the day as it was and passes no judgement on him.