Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.
This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.
Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?
The Time Question
Ever start your day thinking you will hack on a project, and in the evening, realize you’ve instead done something else entirely? Sometimes you find something cool while distracted, and sometimes, getting distracted comes to haunt you.
This has been a staple of my days as long as I remember my conscious life, and at some point, I started wondering just how much this could be modified. Do you remember one particular project we’ve seen a couple people build, a vibration-based compass build that gives you a sense of where north is? Ironically, I have made PCBs for building my own version of this project – they were designed in 2022, I finally ordered them last year in 2023, and I haven’t gotten to assemble them still.
So, you can give yourself a sense of “where’s north” – something that humans are missing, generally. Technically, humans are also missing a source of time, which is why we always supplemented it with wrist-worn watches and pocket clocks. Having compared my day plans to what actually happens on that day for two decades, I can see that I need something more than that. It’s traditionally been common for me to mis-estimate when exactly I could get something done – I would give an estimate that felt correct, then start doing part of the task and forget about the flow of time, minutes passing by me.
So, there are two problems here. One of them is that, despite having been alive for a fair bit of time, my database of “how much it takes for me to do X” is inaccurate. This makes sense: keeping such references is a conscious effort that might not extend to, and day-to-day situations are highly variable. Still, if someone is relying on me, it would be nice to be aware enough to at least notify that person, and to learn to plan ahead. Another is that it’s easy for me to get and forget about the flow of time. It sure helps me concentrate on articles, but it doesn’t help when someone is waiting on me.
At some point, this started to screw with my sense of self. Really, just how much can you rely on some aspects of your mind if it continuously fails you and people you care about, in a manner that you are expected to “just figure out already”? You have to learn to distrust certain basic aspects of your cognitive processes; again and again, something as “simple” as time planning is weighted down by all the instance of letting people down with zero intention to do so. This is a pretty uncomfortable position to be in, if being honest with yourself is a priority of yours. Unsurprisingly, it also made things pretty difficult when talking about employment or real-life obligations. Something had to be done.
Well, could you give yourself a sense of time, say, with vibromotors? Apparently, you can, but there’s nuance to it. Let me tell you about two projects I’ve built to attempt this, and some basic concepts I learned about human-computer integration.
The Not-A-Bomb Wearable
My first project in this vein grew out of a purpose-less experiment, funnily enough: a project literally called I Made This And I Don’t Know Why – a simple board I built to make use of seven-segment displays our hackerspace had a dozen of. ESP8266, dynamic indication with a shift register, and MicroPython – writing firmware for this board was a nice challenge in writing non-blocking code and finding portions of code to optimize. Soon, the board found a good few purposes – among them, a time tracker.
I decided to solve a simple problem – building a mental database on the amount of time does it take me to get from “start” to “finish” for an arbitrary task. Tracking that was tricky – say, I want to check the length of a bicycle ride from my house to a certain point. I’d need to check my phone at the exact time when I left the house, keep that time in mind, and then, once I’ve arrived to my destination, check again. Both of these require some time to execute and some memory, so, I decided to make an automatic countdown timer. Glancing at my wrist felt significantly easier, so, after some cutting, sewing, and hotglue work, I made one of the IMTAIDKW boards into an oversized watch, and used one of my universal power source designs to power it from a 18650.
There were some setbacks during – notably, this countdown timer required me to patch MicroPython’s ESP8266 port, due to an obscure bug making the time.time() function seriously imprecise; an inaccurate countdown timer wasn’t in my plan. Still, it was a nice experiment – relying on something that you build yourself is always fun, and I’ve added features like adjusting the start time. It was also automatic enough to be useful, with digits large enough and bright enough to be noticeable, still, making for an unobtrusive device, and pretty cool to wear.
The main problem was that I forgot to put it on and start the countdown. It was a purpose-built device, and I only needed it a couple times a day at its very most, so most of the time it stayed off my wrist, and I would even lose track of it sometimes. Another problem was remembering to check the time of arrival, unsurprisingly – looking at my wrist was easy enough, so most of the time I could notice the time difference and go “oh interesting”, but even then, it was easy to forget. The last, main problem, was actually keeping a mental database – turns out that when you need to remember pretty similar datapoints, it’s easy to confuse them. Does it normally take me 15 minutes to get to the city center, or was it the electronics store? This turned out to be pretty easy to mix up.
The lessons from this iteration: decreasing resistance to use is good, collecting data is good, and, you should automate the data collection process if at all possible. I wouldn’t stop here, of course – some time later, I found an even nicer wristband to hack on.
Unconventional Battery Upgrades
The TTGO (or was it Lilygo?) T-Wristband is a fun product – with an ESP32 at its heart, a good few sensors, a 160 x 80 IPS LCD, and a single capacitive button. It’s an old device by now, but when I bought it in the beginning of 2020, it was fun to hack on, and hack it I did, making it run MicroPython. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it, but soon I remembered about the “sense of time” project. At the time, I wanted to tap into my life minute-by-minute and see if I could build a device able to help me notice when I’m distracted. The minimum viable prototype idea was very simple – adding a vibromotor to the watch, then having it vibrate exactly every minute, having it be an “am I currently spending my time correctly” reminder.
The problem was, by the time I came up with that, a good few months passed where the wristband was sitting in a drawer with the battery fully discharged – hurting its capacity a bit, which, at 80 mAh, was already not great. Also, I wanted to be able to keep adding features to the code without carefully balancing sleep modes or having to charge my watch multiple times throughout the day; I just wanted to run code and charge the battery every night at most. So, it got a battery upgrade – a Samsung phone battery glued to, ahem, yet another wristband, and a devboard with vibromotor driver taped on top. After the hardware tweaks, the code itself was seriously easy to write.
Whenever I’d notice it vibrating, I’d ask myself – “am I doing the right thing right now?” And, to my surprise, it did catch some distraction moments every now and then, for sure! Oftentimes, I wasn’t doing the right thing, in one way or another, and a reminder about being supposed to do something else was quite welcome. Other times, when I was focused on something, the “am I doing the right thing” question would get a “yes” in my mind, and, it felt good to think that.
It wasn’t as comfortable in times when I wasn’t expecting me to be on top of things – while I’d be resting, the every-minute feedback of the watch would feel annoying and needlessly distracting; soon, I implemented a vibration toggle with the capacitive button, and a few other things. My guess is that the annoyance factor and generally getting used to the vibrations has made me less sensitive to the vibromotor’s signal, which in turn made the wearable less effective at its goal. Apart from that, the battery wire kept breaking every so often, taking the watch out of commission, which made it hard to start properly relying on it.
On the upside – it turned out that this idea has been floating in collective unconscious for a while now, to the point that it was the point of a watch worn by one of the characters in Mr. Robot, and a relatable one at that. It’s pretty good to get external independent confirmation that an idea of yours has merit! In particular, the video above reminds me a lot of my experiences – I spent less time on my phone and generally less time doing things I didn’t want to do, I was getting up and walking around more often, and, I had add a small feature that mutes the watch when I go to sleep.
It All Worked Out Despite The Plan
Lessons here? If you can hook your device’s signals into producing a thought in your brain, that helps massively – checking for “am I doing the right thing” every minute came to me naturally, and a lot quicker than I expected it to. Context sensitivity is a must for self-help devices- the wearable would’ve had been way more effective if I had some ways to detect that I’m likely to be distracted, as opposed to having it vibrate indiscriminately every minute. In general, make sure your device is not annoying to you in any bad way – it’s supposed to be helping you, so any reason you’re annoyed by it, is a problem for the device’s primary usefulness.
On the hardware side, make your device reliable – building habits takes an ongoing effort, and you want it to be consistent. At the same time, consider building your device as a playground for developing your idea further; this could require a bigger battery, or more space inside the case, or an expansion socket. Reality is to plans what pure oxygen is to paper, and getting things done is typically way more important than getting them right the first time. Last but by no means least, wires suck – I’ve been saying this, and I will repeat that as much as needed.
In the end, I have mostly solved my original problem by tweaking my personal approach to time over the years, learning to over-estimate estimates, and ultimately putting myself in less situation where I am under time pressure – it turned out that was the bigger problem. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve noticed that sooner, but, the devices I’ve built certainly have helped. Today, I still have some sense-of-time solutions I rely on, but they are new, designed with these lessons in mind, and they’re a part of a multi-faceted system that I can only tell you about in the next articles – stay tuned!
Vibrating metronome watches are also good for this off the shelf – As hardware anyway, the nice cheap Soundbrenner Pulse has terrible software + will benefit from reverse engineering
agreed, someone really gotta do it!
The Soundbrenner Pulse’s hardware is decent for a metronome, but its software is lacking. Reverse engineering could definitely improve the experience.
Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago I made an android widget which showed how many hours were left until I turned 80 years old. So every time I unlocked my phone for anything, I saw that number.
It was an interesting experiment but I saw no productivity increase. Or maybe there was. I am unsure.
oh nice! I was thinking about that on a year’s scale on a month’s scale, humans aren’t great at perceiving large numbers.
You pretty much described ADD, mine was diagnosed relatively late in life.
ADD often has a hyperfocus aspect, where one gets deep into a task that the sense of time disappears.
One method of preventing hyperfocus uses a 20 minute kitchen timer to let you know how much time has passed. IIRC, it is called Pomodoro.
I hope to follow up on your journey.
Yup, I also got diagnosed later in life. The shame Arya mentioned revolving around constantly letting people down while trying my hardest not to hits hard. And it’s something that comes easy enough to most people that they don’t get that your brain is broken and you’re not being malicious or uncaring. You just literally can’t get your body to do what you want. I might have to try building something like this now that i’m medicated and I have some semblance of executive function :P
Me too on the “late in life” diagnosis. For me, the meds help a lot for three or four days, but after that they’re pretty ineffective and I need to take a break. Plus my cardiologist really doesn’t want me taking them, so I seldom use them.
You’re so right in that “broken brain” comment. Fortunately, my wife completely gets it, so I have good “in-house support”. ;-)
On the plus side, there are times when the hyper-focus really pays off. And I really think that the all-over-the-place nature of my brain is at the heart of much of my creativity and ability to think outside the box. I see relationships and draw connections that most people don’t.
As a result of this piece I’m now looking for a cheap smart watch – one that I can make vibrate every 15 minutes to make me more aware of the passage of time, and that won’t sell me out to data brokers. I suppose I could make one, but I have a bunch of other too-long-ignored projects that I’m more interested in.
yeahhhh I honestly can’t find the words to convey just how much suffering is involved in this particular problem and other similar ones, in particular globally, and I’m not sure I want to 😅 hell yeah on building stuff – as a rule, always worthwhile, I can testify!
Just wanted to second the sentiment within these comments.
A fellow called Russell A. Barkley was the editor of a marvellous handbook of ADHD (a medical tome, not aimed at the layperson, but I would think most accessible should they wish to read it), and perhaps more importantly has published his lectures on the web/YouTube aimed at the layperson.
He discusses the notion of “time blindness” which is pertinent here.
I wonder if Pine64’s “pine time” – https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/ – would be of use in bringing this to the wrists of the needy masses.
Speaking of which, I’m supposed to be working. Please excuse me.
:facepalm:
Also, my thanks to the author!
Why would you want to prevent hyperfocus? Most people can’t even focus at all.
because people might not be in control over when they can enter it, and, it comes with its own downsides. plus, figuring out how to summon hyperfocus on control is seriously tempting, and working with it could give one some leads!
I believe hyperfocus is also called the state of flow and there are many articles and devices dedicated to entering it. There is one such device called the crown which measures your brain waves and plays music to accordingly get you there within 5 minutes.
Sometimes I find that it’s a thin line between hyperfocus and tunnel vision. I may miss some peripheral observation that could either make my work more efficient or stop me from continuing on a path to a dead end. Alternatively, I may be obsessively focused on something that in the larger scheme is less important than other things I should be doing.
100% on point! For me, it’s also that if I don’t exert a certain level of control over my hyperfocus, I might forget to drink/eat/etc, and end up disproportionately exhausted.
Didn’t know this was ADD. I have full control over my hyperfocus. Took me a long time to master and I used to be a terrible student because I could hyperfocus or not focus at all.
But yes when I use it at work it basically is a cheatcode. Downside is that I don’t feel hunger or thirst and loss my sense of time. When I am really going, even my hearing stops working.
Definitely not something for everyday. But when a lot of important work needs to be done fast, it’s great.
Thank you! ^_^ Now that you say it, I remember, I even made my own Pomodoro timer back in the day!
ADHD is certainly one of the words I had in mind, and a word I sometimes mention to doctors myself! My tactic is to stay away from a medicalized framing in this series, instead, tackling very specific problems one by one. A medical framing is useful – it provides language for describing a set of conditions/problems/characteristics. Unfortunately, it carries a fair bit of baggage.
1) One glaring problem with a medical framing is its fallibility. Medical science is constantly advancing, and, from everything I’ve learned and seen so far, I’m comfortable relying on a medical framing in my research, for how much it appears to be missing and how much I’ve learned along the way. The wild variations in what’s considered to be “correct” are easy to notice even here – some countries and medical communities use ADD/ADHD, some iirc use ADHD solely, and some have a wholly different approach. Plus, not gonna lie, “attention deficit hyperactive disorder” is not a good description of how it feels – rather, it’s a description of how it looks from the outside.
2) Unsurprisingly, especially in western countries, there’s barriers to getting a diagnosis for women/non-“white” people/other minorities, which points to subpar standards in the medical field when tackling anything not considered “normal”. Combine that with an inherently gatekeep-y nature of getting a diagnosis, and you can notice the framing losing its usefulness even in the population it was always thought to be mostly applicable for. Essentially, if I’m calling it “ADHD”, I would be bringing associated stereotypes and requirements with it, and that’s not helpful in the slightest.
3) While having a different relationship to sense of time is an ADHD characteristic, other people might have it in different contexts and different points in time without having other characteristics we would describe as ADHD.
4) Even outside of a strictly medical context, in a “ADHD community” sense, ADHD is a field on its own – if I use the ADHD framing, I’m forced to play on the level the field is currently at. Instead of rising one abstraction level above, I want to tackle the subject directly.
5) Not everyone knows that their problems might fall into the subset of what we currently describe as “ADHD”, I certainly didn’t when I was young, but “Hack Your Sense Of Time” is something that would’ve surely attracted my attention, and going by “ADHD”.
Still, yall might want to talk ADHD with your doctor if things become too relatable =D Medication can very much help; I won’t go there, in my view, I’d be going into territory of giving medical advice, which is a thorny thing to touch.
>there’s barriers to getting a diagnosis for women/non-“white” people/other minorities, which points to subpar standards in the medical field
There’s a historical reason to that: mental/medical diagnoses were used to justify putting people, especially minorities and women, into institutions. See for example, all the women who were diagnosed and virtually imprisoned for “hysteria”.
If I understand your message correctly, that implies the “do not diagnose” decision was made in the patient’s interest, which is just not believable. As far as I’ve heard from the affected patients’ experiences, time and time again, concern for the patient’s wellbeing never appeared to be the case when making such a decision and neither was it explained – mind you, such decisions are to be made with patient’s consent. In particular, with ADHD, diagnosis = effective medical treatment, at which point you’d hypothetically be making a decision of the kind that a patient definitely needs to be involved in and informed about, so I’m double not buying that. There’s a well-established history of medical discrimination, and rarely ever is it in patient’s interest – instead, it invariably goes along the lines of “doctors/nurses can’t recognize when a woman is having a heart attack because it shows up differently in them than in men, and the differences are way too often not taught in medical school, in large part because only men were ever studied”. As a result, the medical framings tend to result in giant blind spots to this day if you don’t fit the “average well-studied patient” template.
As I understand it, the problem is rather that some strange behaviour is considered normal for a minority group, and/or/so there is a hidden fear to declare someone of this group ill. The consideration, be it intentional or not, may be inherited from the teachers, perhaps without noticing it; the fear may result from the social context the doctor lives in. I think, summarizing this as “historical reasons” here is valid.
It’s not a decision made in the interest of the patient, but in a sort of cultural anxiety. It’s basically positive discrimination that turns into negative practice, because there’s now a cultural stigma about it. People are being too careful on a subconscious level when they’re over-thinking and second-guessing the standards they’re applying.
It’s also an issue that is highly politicized – in some cases you effectively cannot say that a person’s behavior is irrational or insane, because there are other people who will loudly complain that you’re medicalizing a social issue.
I view the “problem” differently, i.e. MY brain works properly, and the rest of society have broken brains, so that they can never fully focus, and immerse themselves into a problem. They bumble from problem to problem trying to do “time management” (which is impossible, unless you have control over time), without the required focus to actually solve anything.
Worked for me for over 3 decades (5 if you count childhood as well)… :-)
Oh, I had ADHD!
Until I had the H beaten out of me as a child…
(It seems bullies don’t like smart aleck kids spouting off truth)
i appreciate the hack and before wearable was everywhere i was going in this same direction but seriously…wearable is everywhere. if your hack is software, write it for existing hardware.
Sadly, I’m not writing an app or firmware you can download – I’d rather talk about purposes that everyone can adapt their preferred hardware to. Developing a project for a certain hardware platform often means locking your idea into a specific audience at a specific social level – here, I’m really presenting a concept that could apply way more widely than any hardware I could do. By no means am I recommending people get a T-Wristband and strap an extra battery to it, and that’s for a reason =D
This is crazy!
The same idea is floating through my head for quiet some time now.
I would just need a wristband that vibrates every x minutes. Maybe connected to my phone via Bluetooth to set the interval length.
No display, please :)
When I need a constant reminder, I just set my phone’s timer for a few minutes then tap the phone every time it goes off.
It’s not a hack, but it’s something just about everyone reading this can do without having to dig through their junk drawer or drag out a soldering iron.
People who experiment on themselves usually fall victim of the Hawthorne effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
It’s the same phenomenon as to why fuel economy voodoo tricks for cars, like magnets or adding acetone in your gasoline, seem to actually reduce fuel consumption: as soon as you start to observe something that depends on your own behavior, you tend to change your behavior according to the desired effect. In other words, the driver of the car starts to unconsciously drive more economically, and the person who tries to hack their own sense of time with a wrist buzzer automatically starts to pay more attention to time passing.
Ye this and a number of other biases is why I’m talking about collecting data (more on that incoming!), and sharing these concepts so that they can be tried on a wider scale – such changes can be hard to quantify and find actual reasons for, “impressions” are not a great measure, and often the limited data sources aren’t of help to distinguish real causes either. On the other side, if a gadget like this can make me pay more attention to time while I’m wearing it, do I really care about the exact degree that the Hawthorne effect is involved? =D
Well, you could also buy empty medicine capsules and fill them with sugar, and then chant to yourself “This pill will help me pay attention!” every time you take one.
Placebo tends to stop working after the novelty wears off.
Taking a pretty obviously multi-factor system and focusing on one possible factor involved is narrow-sighted. Considering what I have written, doing that requires asserting that a timed sensory input has no impact on one’s perception of time or anything else noteworthy in this context, and I just don’t find it useful to subject my everyday life to null hypothesis testing like that.
It requires long term testing and careful observation of the effect. If the effect is caused by novelty, then it should “wear out” after a while. You should also differentiate between learning to observe time better and learning to use the clock as a crutch instead – it may not necessarily have any impact on your perception of time per se.
In my opinion and experience, the perception of time is more about memory: time seems to go differently when you make note of events happening during a period of time. When we were kids and everything was new, days seemed to last forever – now when everything is more routine, time seems to pass quickly because there’s nothing new to remember and anchor the perception of time to these events.
In other words, if you get so used to having a buzzer on your wrist that you start to ignore it, even if it did initially help you identify the passing of time, you may start to lose track anyways because you start forgetting how many times the clock has buzzed since you last made a mental note of it.
I know you did your research but It looks like this is task for PineTime.
absolutely feels like it! I don’t think I’m well suited for making a PineTime work like that, it doesn’t feel like an engaging project for me at the moment and the direction I took was pretty fun for me, but I’m certain others could.
There is diagnosed ADD in one of my siblings. Have the hyperfocus trait. Worked as a computer operator for 8 years. Sense of time became pretty accurate due to job requirements. I could go take a 30 minute nap on the conference table and would wake up 2 minutes before alarm. It is still pretty good if I don’t read , code or do other enjoyable tasks. My SO says that I think time stops when I read.
It doesn’t?
The T-Watch S3 by Lilygo has a larger battery and a built in haptic motor. By putting the device to sleep and having it wake up using the built in RTC every minute the battery life might be suitable for this project. I’m using the watch and find it well designed with a good programming infrastructure.
Wearable with 5 sensors poking every 10 seconds. Paired with an app that allows the user to classify if they where on task or of task or whatever.. small model running on the wearable.. it does something when it predicts your of task or whatever.. maybe some physical way to give it feed back.. seems fun. Never going to get around to it though
I have a really old pocket watch o inherited from my grandpa, really loud click spring and escapement and it needs to be wound up every other day. It drives my wife mad but I swear I’m most productive when I’m hearing the tic-toc of it.
I think you’re less worried about the passage of time and more worried about being focused. This isn’t a “the human body is weak” moment it’s a “mindfulness” moment. So when my nephew was struggling in school my sister sent him to my house to see if there was something I could do. The first day I gave him a hug, let him know I was there to help, and then I asked if it was okay that I watch him closely. The answer was yes. So as it turned out he was good at school but he had some focusing issues; he had no abstract concept of the focusing cycle. We both have underlying adhd-like symptoms so we’re on equal grounds there.
So the way I explained it to him is there’s four parts to focusing, especially when you don’t want to. The first step is you gain focus, the next step is you are focused, the next step is distraction, and the last step is refocus. So for my nephew it took him a couple seconds to get focused, he was genuinely focused for like 30 seconds, but then he was distracted, it only takes a moment, and it took him a few more seconds to realize he was distracted when I mentioned it. The entire cycle time was about 4 minutes which is impressive, my understanding is non ADHD people have cycle times around 6-10 minutes.
So what I explained to him is that he can focus, and he did focus, it was for a couple minutes before he got distracted. For reference each of these steps are able to be worked on, for instance I was honest with him and said the music he was listening to was good music, even if it wasn’t my jam, but that it was genuinely distracting because it was actively tugging on his attention, book less distractions means it takes longer to get distracted. So what I told him is we can’t really do anything internally to focus longer, but if he “focused”, haha, on getting focus and recognizing when he’d been distracted that would allow him to iterate the cycle quicker with less time spent distracted.
He went from failing every class to getting on the honor roll so something must’ve worked. I also made sure he was eating 3 times a day and drinking at least one fair sized glass of water every day. And among other things I also mentioned that he was useless for schoolwork after 7 PM because the focus part of the cycle was too short and anything he needed to do had to be done before then.
I hear you, loud and clear.
What helped me a lot in the past years is an app called SimpleTimeTracker. No cloud, no ads, with reasonable backup and export options.
Takes care of the day to day, ad hoc ideas, documents the failures in tracking, does most of the math in a beautiful way. I learned a lot about what I do and how long it takes.
Currently I am looking into bringing streamlined ideas out of this experience to my Linux desktop and an ESP32 for special usages – ones I know I want and can stick to.
Take a picture with your smart phone when you start and stop your project. The time stamps gives
you the time it took. The image documents your progress.
You could also buy a wearable bluetooth button that activates the camera. Even a blank image taken with your phone in your pocket will record the time.
A camera in your work space, raspberry pi cam, with motion capture, can record coming and going. So may a Ring doorbell camera. You pass buy the camera on the way into your shop, and again on your way out. Check out using linux with a camera and Motion package.
If I understand Dr. Carlo Rovelli (and it’s entirely possible I don’t) time is just our subjective perception of increasing entropy. So I think what we need is an entropy-based wristwatch. Perhaps a watch that displays a perfect grid of pixels at the start of each day and inverts random individual pixels over the course of a day?
I mean you could just create a wristwatch which lost parts over the course of a day, but resetting it each morning would be challenging, although it would be a good metaphor for some of our lives.
I’m delighted to see that your article resonates not only with me but so many others. I too once built a leather cuff that housed a vibrating motor, rtc, microcontroller…. Called it the clock tower watch since the buzzes followed a clocktower logic (one buzz at quarter past, two at half o’clock, three at quarter to and x buzzes on the respective hour). No other featuresbut an on/off switch and a burned in design of “here & now”. Currently I am working on the third revision because I like it so much. It does help me to have a feeling for the passage of time and, I always tend to have a pretty good idea what time it is without ever looking at a watch and these to factors do help me to focus / realise that I’ve wasted x minutes on some site that is not hackaday.
There are some Timex watches with a built in hydration alarm. I think some of those vibrate. But the best part is, when you cycle through the menu to set it up, the display reads “HYDRA”.
I heard about this on the podcast and immediately jumped over here because I’ve tried some of these exact ideas to help me deal with my ADHD (not to be rude or pry, but are you diagnosed? I’d honestly be surprised if you’re not as your description of time blindness and some of the other symptoms is almost word perfect to the diagnostic criteria).
I actually have sitting on my desk right now a project I call the big red button, it’s a big red button that flashes continually and annoyingly until I do certain tasks that I tend to keep putting off until it gets too late, it’s a simple alarm clock circuit running on an Arduino that resets every morning, I’m using it to help with reliably brushing my teeth. It worked very well at the beginning but as with most of these technologies and ADHD they dull after a while. My next project is to upgrade it to a Raspberry Pi or something that can play sounds and make pressing its big chunky button even more satisfying (possibly add the sound of HAL 9000 being deactivated for fun 😅)
For your travel time problem I’d actually recommend a different technical solution, Google Maps, specifically just look up all the places you need to estimate travel for sometimes and literally memorise the travel times like you’re studying for a test. It’s a lot more effective a lot quicker than trying to use your underdeveloped prefrontal cortex (the neuroplasticity just isn’t there with ADHD, you’ll just spin your wheels until you die)
Is it possible to follow a specific article series? I’d love to hear about your next projects 😃
This sort of thing is the real deal for cybernetics as a cooperative endeavor where a human augments their capabilities with thoughtfully designed machines.
I have never had any kind of visual memory or visual imagination (something that seems to be heritable and run on my mother’s side of the family) and I remember the “Aha!” moment when I discovered OpenSCAD because it took verbal/conceptual input (a linear text document describing physical relationships in space) and could render it in a snap. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used it just to stand in for the visual imagination some 95% of Earth’s population takes for granted…