Article
How Untimer handles interruptions
An interruption does not end a session in Untimer. You press Interruption, choose where it came from and write one line about it. The line comes back under Where you left off, and a study by Leroy and Glomb is behind it.
A message, a colleague or a thought that arrives sideways can interrupt a session. In Untimer an interruption does not end the session. It is something to notice, and the session keeps running while you note it.
What you enter
While a session runs there is a button that says Interruption. Pressing it opens a small sheet called Noticing an interruption, with two questions on it. Was it something in your head or something around you? What was it, so you can pick it up later? Choose Something in my head for a thought or an urge, or Something around me for a person or a phone. Write a line under What was it, or leave it empty. Press Note it to save, or Skip to close the sheet. You are back in the session inside five seconds, and the session keeps running the whole time.
After you save, the button reads Interruption (1), and the number goes up with each interruption you note.
Where you left off
What you write comes back later. The message box under the greeting on the Timer screen holds the last line you wrote under the heading Where you left off, ahead of its tips and facts. It is there when you open Untimer again. A line written on an earlier day carries the day in the heading, for example Where you left off, yesterday, or Where you left off, on Tue 12 Aug. A line from today carries no date, because you were there.
The note stays in the box until you put it away. A note from last week is still true, and a cutoff that dropped it would drop it on the morning you most needed it, so the box keeps it and names the day. Putting it away on one device removes it on your other devices, and the next line you write replaces it. This is the part of Untimer with the clearest study behind it.
Attention residue
In 2009 Sophie Leroy described something anyone who has been interrupted will recognise. When you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays on the first one, and it stays more stubbornly when the first task was left unfinished. She called it attention residue. It shows up as worse performance on the second task while your mind keeps going back to the first.
In 2018 Leroy and Glomb tested a remedy in four studies. Before switching, people spent a moment writing a short plan for the interrupted task: where they were, what they would do next and what stood in the way. They called it a ready to resume plan. People who wrote one carried less residue into the next task and did better on it. A short plan worked as well as a long one, so long as it was written.
The interruption sheet is that plan in its shortest form. The one line Untimer asks for is written at the moment of leaving, and the line that meets you when you return is the plan being handed back.
Inside and outside
The sheet asks whether the interruption came from inside or outside. Something around you is the phone, the door or a person. Something in your head is the sudden need to check one thing, a thought about dinner or a better idea for a different project. Untimer calls both of them an interruption, because the word distraction is a judgement about you and an interruption is an event. You noticed it, and the record keeps the count and the kind.
What the record keeps
A session with interruptions is still a session. The days list in Insights shows how many interruptions you noticed in each session. With Plus, the Interruptions panel counts them by month over the last year, split into inside and outside. The milestone Left a note appears the first time you write a line at an interruption, and Fifty interruptions appears when you have written down fifty.
The record does not hold the interruption against the session. The session ended when you ended it or when the sand ran out, and its outcome is whichever of those happened. An interrupted session that ran its length counts in full.
Why it is small
A journal, a list of open loops or a review screen would make more of the idea. We considered all three and kept the line, for the reason the study gives: the plan works because it is brief and because it is written at the moment of leaving. A journal is something you do instead of working, and a line is something you do on the way back to it.
The sheet has two questions, the return shows one line, and the whole exchange takes a few seconds.