💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › proving-a-negative captured on 2024-08-18 at 19:30:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
One of my wishes stretching back many years now is a “reverse timer”.
A normal timer is great at setting a maximum amount of time I spend on something. Let’s say I wanna eat cookies and read smutty comics but I don’t wanna carried away because I also wanna do the dishes later. Setting a timer or an alarm, especially placing it far away so I have to leave my chair to go turn it off, is a great way to accomplish that. I use it all the time, it’s wonderful.
But I what I would need at least as often is setting a minimum amount of time to spend, like working. With the comics & cookies, it’s fine if I end it early because I get more motivated to do something else, but that’s the opposite of what I want when I’m in a little room and I’m working on something good. There, it’s fine if I work a li’l longer than I planned; what I want is a minimum, not a maximum. Or I could set both if I really needed; if the “reverse time keeper” invention existed, I could set that to 20 minutes minimum and combine it with a traditional timer at one hour or whatever I needed.
I know that this doesn’t exist, can’t exist. But I have such a hard time convincing myself about that. I have sympathy for all those suckers who tried to make a perpetuum mobile or square the circle. I feel the same way about this.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve gotten close. For some tasks, having an audio accompaniment like a specific record or podcast would work. “I need to work as long as I’m on the first episode” or whatever. It’s rare that I can do good work with audio on so what I use most often is a sand timer. I can glance at it and if the sand’s still moving, I’ve got to keep working. If I forget about time and keep working more than the minimum, it doesn’t rudely 🍅 interrupt my flow. I think this is also one of the reasons why body doubling so well. An alarm clock can’t tell if I’m about to leave my workdesk early but another person can.
It’s hard to logically disprove (at least to my own overly daydream-prone satisfaction) that this invention could exist just like it’s hard to disprove other negatives. Human knowledge will always have some gaps I guess, unless logic can improve beyond Celarent and Barbara.