I’m a fan of both Pester (although author Riley once tempted me with shots of a Pester 2.0 he never developed!) and of TinyAlarm, both alluring in their freeness and in their simplicity.

Interesting read. Thanks everyone. I like the ProdMe widget but my personal favourite is still Fob (by Leaky Puppy Software). The interface is cute and I like how it shows the countdown in in the dock. Unfortunately, it is no longer being maintained.

Here’s a link to write-up by the Mad Professor which not only mentions “Fob” but also 43folders.

http://www.madprofessor.net/archives/cat_etc.html

I, too, went looking for a good stopwatch app about 6 months ago. Haven’t tried the ones mentioned here, but I do want to recommend Apimac Timer 2.0.1 (http://apimac.com/timer/index.php). It has countdown, a timer, and an alarm clock. The alarms are highly configurable with multiple actions (e.g., you could have the alarm turn down the iTunes volume, sound an alarm, and speak a pre-recorded reminder message using the Mac speech synthesizer).

Apimac has lots of other useful little shareware apps too; Text Cleaner is a simple but very flexible text code stripper.

Any hints on PC timers? Us PC users need to get things done, too, y’know :)

xReminder Pro is a great little shareware timer (& reminder) program for PC. The timer functions are simple compared to the Mac apps discussed above, but it gets the job done.

Back in October 2005 I found the need for just a basic alarm clock, as I was travelling out of the country. I was torn between Meridian and Awaken (http://www.embraceware.com); Meridian for its absolutely gorgeous interface and features, Awaken for its minimalist (yet beutiful) interface and price. In the end I went with Awaken, since its $8.95 price was more in line with how much I would be using it.

OK, this is very much a nitpick but you might want to find an alternate term for what you call environmental variables. The problem is that to a Unix geek (and most Mac programmers probably qualify), “environment variable” refers to something specific which is different from what you want.

This has been your Daily Annoying Nerd Note. You may now proceed with your previously scheduled activity.

Good catch, mkb — sounds like I want the timer to update my bash profile, eh? :)

I have been doing the (10+2)*5 thing for about a week now (love it!), and since I am confined to a PC at my office, have been using a free timer program called “CoolTimer.” It’s not fancy, but it does the trick. I like that it hides in the system tray while it’s counting down, but then jumps right up in front of your face when it’s time to take a break.

Available at:

http://www.harmonyhollow.net/ct.shtml

I’m loving a pretty little widget, Meditation Timer

http://meditationresources.com/

because it’s simple, can be set for any amount of time you like, has a ‘wait’ function, so if you’re feeling squirrelly you can set a 1-3 minute wait time just to calm your mind before starting, and it has a really nice ‘ring’ to begin and end. In a perfect world, I would use it daily actually to meditate. But for now, it’s working to motivate me.

I’ve been using Meridian for the (10+2)*5 hack and wrote a little tutorial on how I did it here:

http://www.lifeclever.com/index.php/2006/07/15/structured-procrastination-with-the-1025-hack-and-meridian/

I had not seen Flextime before writing it, but it looks like a great app and I especially like the ability to create routines. I’m going to give it since it’s free. I had tried Minuteur but I found the metaphor of using a ruler to measure time a little odd and lacking in affordance.

The one feature of my trusty kitchen timer that no computer-based timer I’ve seen yet is this: It beeps once when I’ve got 10 minutes left, then twice when I’ve got 5 minutes left. I do 60 minute “dashes” and I just love that because I know when I can start wrapping up without having to futz with anything.

Do either of these support that?

Thanks for the tips. I’ve been using the interval timer on my el-cheapo running watch to set up repeating 10+2 alarms, but it’s annoying to have to change it every other day when I actually want to use it for running! I’ll have to check these out.

BTW, I have to ask, based on your link above — you do realize that Sophie’s Choice was a book first, right? The hilarious scenes at the beginning of the book where Stingo’s working at a publishing house are right up your snarky little alley, Merlin.

I’ve just started writing this reply and my mac is telling me to get back to work! Anyway, nice spot with these. I’m trying FlexTime and must admit it’s probably going to be one more of my quadzillion ‘little apps’ that I spend my hard earned pennys on. What I need now is a little app to manage all my little apps, or is that Dashboard? Yes, back to work.

thanks for the tips everyone, I use a Mac with an Epson projector and powerpoint in my class and now with these apps I can add timers to tests and other things for my students. Not to mention I am a procrastinator par excellence and need this to get my ‘life’ finished.

The funny thing is that there was a lot of research done years ago that showed that a kind of (10+2)*5 style was the best for learning new information as most people tend to remember the first and last five minutes of a class. Chunking the information like this seems best for the human mind.

you cannot buy time…but how about a timer?…

scheduling and time management are not muy strong suits. I have been in this constant pursuit for scheduling and time management tools, resources and how to’s. The astute and creative folks at 43 Folders always have good stuff. Since I acquired a…

gina, with flextime you could just set up a routine that does what you described.

merlin, thanks so much for mentioning minuteur. it stopped working when i upgraded to tiger, so i just wanted to reproduce the error so i could ask for advice here. only i couldn’t reproduce the error — the newest version of minuteur works perfectly, and after just half a minute of prodding at it, i already discovered 2 new features that are really cool. can’t wait to get done with this comment, get back to the app and play with it some more; now i’m totally motivated for some hot (10+2)*5 action. next time i have some spare change in my paypal account, the minuteur author is soooo getting a donation.

my top wishlist feature: automatically setting the system preference that lets my mac wake up, say, a minute before the alarm should sound, so i can’t ever miss an alarm because my ‘puter fell asleep. anyone know of an app that does this?

until now i have been using alarm clock 2 [http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/index.html] which i found quite gorgeous: lean, unintrusive (unless it should be ), simple enough (but not too simple), supports multiple alarms/countdowns/…, and happens to be one of the apps that can actually wake your computer (@ nex). in short: does exactly what it ought to. flextime looks quite promising to me, though…

Docktimer is free (donations welcome), simple and unobtrusive. Nothing fancy—it counts down right in your dock, which means it doesn’t eat up valuable menubar space, but it’s easy to see when you’re working in any application.

http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0007943/en/apps/index.html

thanks sascha, i’ll give that app a try. it even supports iTunes … i used to use iCal for scheduling an iTunes track to wake me up, but i always had to manually set the wake-up time for the computer as well, which got old fast.

Just wanted to comment on a couple of items on your wishlist. I was hoping to be able to fire things off via quicksilver and I just downloaded the latest version of Minuteur today. The latest version comes with some scripts including starting a 10 minute countdown. That means it should be easy to create another script for 2 minutes and fire either of them off via quicksilver.

Minuteur has now added some project loggin features. You can choose a project from a list and use the stopwatch to time how long you are working on it. When you stop the stopwatch it allows you to enter a description of what you did and even calulates a cost based on what you enter in the preferences.

The only problem here is you can’t have a stopwatch and a separate countdown at the same time!

Finally the fullscreen mode is very cool.

[…] 2 OS X timers to watch: Flextime & Meridian Need a clock for OSX? Check these two out. Merlin Mann’s endorsement is all I need. (tags: clock timer osx mac macintosh apple software utilities productivity) Social Bookmark- SelectBlinkList del.icio.us Digg it Furl ma.gnolia Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Simpy Spurl Yahoo MyWeb Filed in: del.icio.us | No Comments » […]

If anyone out there has QuicKeys, it’s a fairly easy way to set up an automated 10+2x5 Dash:

1—Create a new shortcut

2—Scope is “All Parts of All Applications” and the trigger is the QuicKeys Menu (but you can do something else)

3—Insert a “Display Message and Play Sound” step. Have it display “Start task now” (or whatever you want) in a window. Also have it continue automatically after 600 seconds (10 minutes). “Step results” should be to “continue to next step.”

4—Insert another “Display Message and Play Sound” step but this time, make the message “Take a break” (or whatever else) and have it continue automatically after 120 seconds (2 minutes). “Step results” should be to “continue to next step.”

5—Copy/paste these two steps four times, giving you a total of five cycles. You can make the last step have the message of “Dash complete” and the “Step Results” stop the shortcut.

Hope that’s helpful to others. It works great for me!

[…] After reading Merlin Mann’s recent post on timer apps for the Mac, I’ve been trying out the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack with a new shareware application called FlexTime. FlexTime allows you set “routines” of different “activities” than can repeat indefinitely. […]

How about a little motivator for those who use time apps and are willing to spend less time procrastinating? Set countdown to your projected end of.. err.. life (120 years anyone?) on your time app of choise and look at it once it a while.

For those who are used to time increasing on clocks, this little widget might help get used to see time as actually decreasing. Then “How important is the task you’re ingaged in at the moment or plan for later?”. And “Do you still feel like putting off a truly important task?”.

Remember to relax and enjoy each moment. You still have some time.

Alarm Clock Pro from Koingo Software (www.koingosw.com) is wayyyyy better than Meridian. I checked out Meridian and itsmessy interface and lack of features make it look like a first run through without any beta testing!

Shooting Muni (Not Like That!)…

Why didn’t anyone tell me there was going to be a Muni protest yesterday? I caught a story on BoingBoing last week……

Gina: Minuteur has a speech function that will say the time remaining in a countdown. Default is every 15 minutes, but you can specify shorter intervals; mine says the time remaining at 10, 5, 2, 1 minutes. I’m still trying out different apps, though — if I find anything else I’ll mention it.

Minuteur is rock solid, a perfect UI, and I’ve been using it over a year now. I looked at so many timers over the past years, at least 15, and Minuteur fits my exact needs. For most reminders, I use Entourage’s Calendar or Task reminders, which pop up a few minutes before each to-do, but for stuff like “Call Mark back in 10”, or “Leave for the dentist at 9!” that need a loud buzz to make me notice, Minuteur is perfect. Glad I finally found it after years of hunting around.