HyperTimer

A visual countdown timer designed to require minimal effort to read and provide a reliable time reference. Primarily useful for people suffering from ADHD, but not limited to that group.

Video demonstration and tutorial: https://youtu.be/rmUZ_iem1xw

HyperTimer in use #1 HyperTimer in use #2

Key values

These are the three design goals that summarize HyperTimer:

1. Minimal attention cost - reading the time should be like breathing - continuous and not requiring any effort
2. Reliability and persistence - nothing short of a complete hardware failure should make you loose track of time
3. A sight to behold - your timer should be a joy to use and to look at, so you want to use it just that little bit more!

Use cases

1. Task clock

   • You have trouble completing tasks on time, but regular timers are too easy to miss or ignore and don't give you piece of mind

2. Break clock

   • You want to take a break from work/study etc, but you tend to drag these out and break your schedule

3. Live event countdown

   • You're preparing to start a livestream at a given time
   • You've started a livestream but need to end it at a certain time

If you find any others, let me know so I can add them here :)

Features

• Countdown timer that can be set between 15 minutes and 48 hours
• Always on top, semi-transparent focusless window that blends with your desktop and becomes a natural part of it
• Large smoothly animated, colorful progress bar to provide relative time reference readable with peripheral vision alone
• Large explicit text mentioning hours, minutes and seconds left to remove confusion and lower read attention cost
• Lockable position and width on your screen - you can always count on your time piece to be where you expect it
• Prevention from accidental closing or resetting of the timer - certain actions require holding down a button to activate
• Timer persistence, so you can continue counting down after re-starting the app or your computer
• Crash recovery to ensure your time reference will never get lost, even if your OS crashes or you loose power
• Variable window width, so you can make the timer as large or small as you want
• Compact, pleasant and animated interface with custom-designed icons to make the interface small and slick
• Anti-aliasing for the progress bar, making it smoothly animate with subpixel precision, to avoid distracting pixel jumps
• Animated "time over" state with optional sound that will ensure you won't miss it

Why not <insert another countdown timer name here> ?

I've tried various timers, but none of them really fit my needs. All productivity countdown timers are one or all of these things:

• Requiring conscious effort to read
• Only showing cryptic digits (HH:MM)
• Easy to miss or ignore
• Easy to cover with other apps, minimize or accidentally close
• Missing any form of a visual progress bar
• Failing to utilize color and animation to increase readability
• Being strictly designed for pomodoro
• Having distracting extra features like a task list, obnoxious updates etc.
• Not surviving a system crash

My needs were simple:

I want a big colorful progress bar that I can composite into my screen and have it stay there no matter what.

My motivation for creating HyperTimer

I've created this tool to help keep myself focused on finishing tasks, and keep a continuous awareness of the time I have left. Time blindness is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in people with ADHD. When we finally focus on something, we can focus too much and completely loose track of time. For me this means I easily get sidetracked to work on minute details, perfecting minor aspects of my work, not realizing I'm already over my time budget, before I have completed the core of my work.

HyperTimer is named as a reference to hyperfocus - which is a state of mind where a person with an attention deficit disorder does focus on something, and once they do manage to focus on something - they do that to a point where they completely filter out reality outside of what they are doing.

Checking the clock doesn't occur to them, and checking the clock, calculating how much time we spent and have left feels like a waste of time and attention that's better spent now on being productive.

This is why HyperTimer has a large, colorful progress bar, and large, descriptive text to provide a readable time reference. It also features an animated seconds counter that updates every 100 milliseconds to help the user make sure the timer is working, and to provide a feeling of urgency.

The visual design is made to be pleasant and smooth when needed, but also - clean and free of distractions when needed.

Usage

1. Position the timer on your screen
2. Lock the position and width using the padlock button. HyperTimer will now always start in this place, and will not allow the OS to move it.
3. Select the amount of time designated for a task (if you right-click on the slider you'll get increased precision)
4. Start the countdown
5. Hide the controls with the arrow toggle. This will make HyperTimer display nothing more than the time left

The app locally stores some usage information in a settings file. The file is in clear text so you can access and modify it freely, however these files won't load if you change the file length.

Contributing

This app is made using Godot 4 game engine. If you're familiar with this development environment and would like to help improve HyperTimer - please get in touch with me first:

https://mastodon.social/@unfa

HyperTimer's Time Is Up screen