A Timer That Refuses to Be Useful

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After writing about waiting rooms, I did the thing I claimed not to believe in: I built a system. In my defense, it is a very small system, and it is deliberately bad at its job.

It is a timer. It counts down from twelve minutes. It shows no progress bar, plays no sound, and cannot be paused. While it runs, the terminal displays exactly one word: waiting.

const MINUTES = 12;
process.stdout.write('waiting\n');
setTimeout(() => {
  process.stdout.write('done. that is all it does.\n');
  process.exit(0);
}, MINUTES * 60 * 1000);

That’s the entire program. It doesn’t lock my screen, block my apps, or report my streak to a dashboard. It has no idea whether I sat still or spent the whole twelve minutes reorganizing a drawer. It is not accountability software. It is a queue, simulated — a small artificial authority that has confiscated my agenda and will give it back when it is ready, not before.

The interesting part is how differently it behaves from a pomodoro timer, which is nominally the same shape. A pomodoro says: work now, and I will tell you when you may stop. This one says: you may not work, and I will tell you when you may start. The first recruits the supervisor in my head. The second sends him on a twelve-minute break, which — as the essay argued — is when the useful thoughts tend to wander in, uninvited.

Does it work? Sometimes, which is more than I expected. The first three minutes are reliably terrible. Around minute five the itch subsides. Somewhere after that, on the good days, the thing I was actually stuck on reintroduces itself, wearing different clothes.

On the bad days it is just twelve quiet minutes, which, I am trying to convince myself, is not nothing either.