cairntimer app
Time's up.
ten more minutes keeps this same session going
Stop here?
How was it?
You type in what you're working on, choose how long you want to focus, and start the timer. While you work, a stone slowly lowers onto today's pile. When the time is up you log the session and rate how focused you were. If you want to keep going you can add ten more minutes. Each session you finish is one stone, and the pile builds up over the day.
You find out how long things actually take. A lot of people, especially people with ADHD, guess badly at this. Something that feels like a twenty minute job takes two hours, every time, and it's a surprise every time. After you've done a task a few times, Cairn Timer shows you the real average. That makes it possible to plan your day around numbers instead of guesses.
You can see what you got done. At the end of a day it's common to feel like you didn't do much, even when you did. The pile on the screen and the signpost next to it list every session with the task and the time. Being able to look at that is a good feeling, and it's also just useful information.
You can see where the time went. If most of a week's stones are email and only a couple are the project you said was the priority, you'll see it. Then you can decide to change it for next week.
It gets easier to keep going. Once there's one stone on the pile, starting the next session takes less effort. Over a few weeks, the trail page shows whether your sessions are getting longer and whether you're rating more of them as focused. That's progress you normally can't feel from one day to the next.
Stopping early is fine. There are no streaks and nothing is lost when you stop a session before the time is up. It gets logged as a shorter stone. If you only lasted a few minutes it's logged as rubble beside the pile. The record is only useful if it's accurate, so the app doesn't push you to make it look better than it was.
Each session becomes a stone. Longer sessions make bigger stones. The pile stays on your screen all day so you can see how much you've done without opening anything.
Every stone is tagged with what you were doing. The trail page adds it up per task: total time, typical session length, your longest session, and whether you're doing more or less of it lately.
If you stop before the timer ends you still get a stone, just a smaller one. A session that only lasted a few minutes shows up as rubble next to the pile.
Add someone by their handle and you'll each see whether the other one has done a session today. You can leave a small stone on their pile to show you noticed. There's no scoreboard.
There's nothing to download. You install it from the browser on each device, and it gets its own icon and window and stays signed in to your account. It takes about ten seconds.
Needs macOS Sonoma (14) or later. On older Macs, use Chrome below.
It opens full screen without the browser bars, and it uses the same account as your computer, so everything stays in sync.
Native apps for iPhone, Apple Watch and Android are being built and will be on the App Store and Google Play. Your account and history will carry over.
A cairn is a pile of stones that marks a trail. Hikers add a stone to it when they pass by. That seemed like a good picture for this app. Each session is one stone, and after a while you can look back and see the whole path.
You work in fixed blocks, usually 25 minutes, with a short break between them. It helps because starting a 25 minute block is easier than starting an open-ended task, and finishing one feels good. Cairn Timer does the timing and also keeps a record of every block you finish. Most pomodoro timers don't keep the record.