Stride: Intent Timer

(Warning: this app is designed to bug you.) A timer to prevent distraction.

Stride is a timer app designed to ease the repeated decision to stay focused, by making sure you never forget to plan how long an activity will take. Keep reading for a how-to-use! WARNING: DO NOT INSTALL WITHOUT READING, as this app will most likely annoy you if you don't expect what it does.

Designed for people like myself, who have trouble focusing without assistance, Stride (previously Pin Sticky Timer) makes it easier for you to focus on one thing, and makes it easier to trust that you can switch to the next thing when it's time. This is how Stride works:

- When you have no timer set, it sets a default one-minute "bother" timer.

- You then give it an intention - a short title for your next task - and the number of minutes you think it'll take

- Then you hit go, and it counts down, just like any other timer.

- When you acknowledge that timer, it goes back to the beginning and sets a default one-minute timer again.

The result: you won't forget to stay focused.

Some suggestions for how to use this for best effect:

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The most important thing is to be honest with yourself about what you want to do: put the next thing you actually want to do right now, not the thing you think you should want to do right now. If that's "look at my todos", "flop on the bed", "check email", "keep reading story", or "take a break", those are all fine. If you aren't doing what you said you were going to do, and you don't want to do it, put a timer for what you're actually doing!

- Spend a timer at the beginning of your day, planning your general structure.

- Don't put long timers when doing useful, productive things. I recommend only using up to half-hour timers for productive tasks, and I personally usually use two to ten minute timers for most things.

- Don't put much longer timers when doing entertainment/social things. I usually use 45-minute timers or so when at parties, and when they go off, I view them as reminders to talk to a variety of people.

- Use the timer as practice with meditation: think of the alarms as a limit for how long you have to focus, and don't "resist" the timer when it goes off, just tell it what your new desire is.

- Don't rush to put a next action in - the one-minute timer isn't out to get you, it's there to work with you.

Features:

- Logs, to sdcard/stride_timers.log, the time each alarm is set, cancelled, goes off, or is acknowledged. This log is designed for machine parsing, not human reading. The format is "unixtime_in_milliseconds event:alarmtype:timeleft Alarm Label".

- Has extra "cancel this alarm" buttons, each of which log what kind of cancellation it was.

- After 9pm and before 5am, offers a "sleep until a specified hour" button.

Known issues:

- Can't be set to vibrate. (this one is a priority.)

- No way to set a timer with less than a minute.

- The time remaining notification doesn't update often enough when there's less than a minute remaining.

- No way to set what time of day you want to show the sleep-for-many-hours button.

- No way to change length of bother alarm.

- Doesn't turn on screen when the alarms go off (not sure I want to change this).

- Settings screen looks awful.

- Can't set alarm sounds that aren't built-in ringtones, as far as I can tell. Not actually 100% sure this bug exists, might be because I uninstalled ES file explorer.

Stride is open source! If you have issues, or you want to modify it, we use a standard Android Studio project and it can be found on https://github.com/hamnox/pin.