Article
Why you hold the hourglass to start a session
Hold the hourglass for two and a half seconds to wind it up. The session starts when you let go. This is why starting works that way and how the hold works with a mouse, a touch screen, the keyboard and assistive input.
Hold the hourglass for two and a half seconds to wind it up. The session starts when you let go and runs for twenty five minutes. A click starts no session, and letting go early unwinds the hourglass without starting one. The hourglass on the front page of this site winds the same way, and it runs a twenty five minute session in your browser.
Why the hold is there
Most timers have a start button, and pressing it is free, so it carries no weight. You can press it while you are still deciding, press it absently, or press it and walk away. The timer starts and you have not.
Winding is built on the research into why starting is the hard part, and it is there to give your decision weight. Two and a half seconds of holding costs you something, and by the time you let go you have already begun. Why starting work is hard covers the research.
While you hold
After a fifth of a second the spring engages. For the next two and a half seconds the hourglass pushes back against you, and sand lifts into the top of it as the spring winds. The word under the hourglass reads Hold to start at rest, Keep holding while the spring winds and Let go once it is fully wound. A ratchet clicks twenty four times, and the clicks get further apart as the spring fills. The pitch drops the way a real mechanism gets heavier the further you wind it. When the spring is full the clicks end and the word reads Let go.
When you let go at the end, the start bell sounds and the session starts. Peach sand runs from the top of the hourglass into sage at the bottom. Peach shows time left and sage shows time used.
If you let go before the spring is full, it unwinds and the sand pours back to the bottom. No session starts, and the unwinding is silent. In the app, a click makes the word under the hourglass say Hold it, briefly.
What winding is
The founder has used a timer every working day for years, and the hold is the beginning he wanted. Winding is a press and a hold. The feel of it comes from four numbers, and they are the same on every screen and will be the same on every device.
- Two hundred milliseconds pass before the spring engages, so a stray press leaves the hourglass at rest.
- Two and a half seconds wind it fully. We tried a second and a half first, and it was over before you noticed you had done anything.
- A resistance curve makes the same steady press move the spring less the further it is wound. The ratchet has twenty four teeth spaced evenly along the spring, which is why the clicks spread out on their own as you go.
- A stop where the spring is full, and a settle of about a third of a second when you let go.
The keyboard works the same way. Hold Enter or Space on the hourglass and release when the word says Let go. If your system asks for reduced motion, the ratchet is silent and the hold still lasts the full two and a half seconds.
The length the wind sets
Winding chooses the length for you, and the length is twenty five minutes. Early versions of the hourglass let the wind pick the length, and that turned the wind into a control. You watched the number instead of feeling the spring. So the wind sets the length at twenty five minutes, and the one decision left at the start is whether to begin.
The hold and the buttons
We built a shortcut for a day, a tap to start beside the hourglass for people in a hurry. Everyone reached for the shortcut and left the hourglass alone. The wind means something because it stands on its own, so the shortcut was taken out.
Every other control in Untimer is an ordinary button. Interruption, Reset, Stop, Start the break and End the break each take one press. A break starts with a press, because rest is something you take and it is there for the asking.
If you cannot hold
Someone who uses switch access, voice control or a screen reader in browse mode can activate a control but cannot hold one. For them there is a separate action, labelled Wind the hourglass up for me. It stays out of sight until it is focused, so it does not sit beside the hold for anyone who can hold. It performs the same wind, with the same two and a half seconds and the same ratchet, and then the session starts. The one thing it does for the person is hold, and a session starts no faster by it.
What you hear
The ratchet is made in the browser, and so are the short tones for a break starting and for a session stopped by hand. Each of the ratchet’s twenty four clicks is a short square wave through a low pass filter, pitched by how far the spring is wound. The clicks follow the position of the spring, so they stay in step with the sand. Recordings play when you let go and the session starts, when a session ends and when a break ends. After the start bell the session runs in quiet until the end bell sounds.
Letting go early is silent, because it is an ordinary thing to do, and no sound in the app marks a failure. The sound switch turns all of it off. It sits in the rail on a wide screen and in the top bar on a narrow one, in plain sight, because the moment you want quiet is usually the moment someone walks into the room.
After the session
When a session ends, the hourglass is replaced by a break scene. A break starts when you press Start the break, and the next session starts when you wind the hourglass again.
How it works describes a session from the wind to the break. Why starting work is hard covers the research on starting.