This one started as procrastination and ended as something I still use every day.

I had a big app idea. Day one I dived straight in, lost myself in it completely, didn’t take a break, got a lot done but ended the day feeling wrung out. Day two I found every reason not to go back. Day three the same. By the weekend the momentum of that first day had completely evaporated and I was further from finishing than I felt on day one.

I knew the fix. Deep work, structured breaks, Pomodoro technique. I went looking for an app to keep me honest and found nothing I wanted to use. The free ones were plastered with adverts for mobile games. The good ones wanted a subscription. I wasn’t paying a monthly fee for a timer.

So instead of working on my app, I built a different app.

I designed it around the things I actually cared about — a settings pane where you can define your own work and break slot sizes, configure the pattern of work, short break, work, longer break, and see the whole shape of your session laid out before you start. No assumptions about what the right split is, because that’s a personal thing and I didn’t want to be told. I made sure it worked in landscape as well as portrait, partly because it felt like good practice and partly because I had a vague idea it might suit a foldable screen nicely.

A year or so later I got a Samsung Fold and found out the answer to that. It works fine in candy bar mode. The big inner screen is not quite the elegant experience I had imagined in Android Studio. These things happen.

The app keeps a log of your sessions — when slots ended, whether you skipped forward, how the time was actually used rather than how you planned to use it. Notifications fire at the end of each slot. It does everything I wanted it to do and nothing I didn’t.

I pushed the APK to GitHub, installed it on my Pixel 8 Pro, it looked fine and worked fine. I am still the only user. I still use it regularly. The big app it was supposed to help me finish never got finished. Worth it.

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