I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing.

I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either.

The app creates a thin, always visible line at the bottom of my screen that shrinks inwards as time passes, at the end of the allotted time the screen will blur preventing me from doing whatever I was doing and snapping me out of my hyperfocus state. I can choose how long the timer runs for and how long the screen blurs for. Tonight I added a loop feature so I can use it like a pomodoro timer with enforced breaks.

It's a simple menu bar app for MacOS and could be better, but it does what I want it to do. I've been using it for the past week and found it really helpful.

I haven't used Swift before so it was a good learning experience too.

It's the same principle as a Time Timer (timetimer.com) which I used previously but I find my app works better as the screen blur actually prevents me from just continuing whatever I'm doing, and the bar is always in my line of sight.

One feature to help those with ADHD would be pulsing the line at a gradually slower rate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274782#38276107 (125+ subcomments circa 2023)

> your brain will try to sync with the light that you can barely see, calming you down and allowing you to go focus-mode with the task in ha[n]d

I use alarms/timers on my phone for this. Almost always 3-5min before a meeting... I have to make a habit of setting them up each morning, but that isn't too bad. I tend to miss the highlight color on the status bar for calendar or even chat messages/notifications. So the loud/obnoxious alarm is best for me... at least as I work from home.

The idea is interesting, but I'm curious as to why you didn't consider trying a Pomodoro Technique timer app, as there are many available. These apps offer time tracking and reporting features that can help boost productivity. Why not consider using existing methods or tools to address the issue instead of developing something new from scratch?

I'm really interested in this if theres a way I could make use of this too? Word for word I have the same list of problems when it comes to me hyperfocusing on things, where I don't even just forget to eat but I can't feel that I'm hungry. Too busy hyperfixating to feel so.

i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096

This sounds really useful for me. Any way to share the code?