I want to find and use a random timer app for iPhone
April 11, 2018 7:45 PM Subscribe
Help me make my iPhone randomly surprise me with an alarm 8 to 16 times a day for the purpose of keeping a personal time diary, improving mindfulness, and hopefully changing habits?
I'd like an app that will cause my phone to either beep, vibrate, or show an alert on the screen. The intervals will hopefully be not shorter than 45 minutes and not longer than 2 hours, while being random.
Previous questions are older and apps suggested in them are either gone, no longer free, and/or focus on much shorter intervals. I'm not a twitter user, so InnerTwitter isn't going to get the job done, but their random once an hour would be so great if I were a user. I don't spend enough time on my computer for a script of that sort to work as well for me as it seems to work for others.
I don't like being in the dark playground and I think that tracking how many times a day I'm there vs doing the things I want to be doing will help re-organize the reward pathways that my brain has tunneled. I think tracking how often I am not in the dark playground will help my brain build a sense of mastery. So I've created a visual chart* and at each alarm, I'd like write the time in the top of the chart and color in the bubble(s) for what I was doing (two bubbles if I'm knitting AND listening to podcasts), two bubbles if I'm on Metafilter and it's serving as a dark playground, one bubble if it's ... functional/adaptive use of the site.
I could kludge this on my phone alarms, but knowing my brain, it would just potentially say "hey bilabial, the 12:18pm alarm is about to happen and we want the prize for not being in the dark playground. Let's be eating lunch when it rings. Then! We can take the prize to the dark playground!" So that wouldn't be ideal for me.
*I'm already using a bullet journal inspired self made paper habit tracker, and I get a lot of pleasure from filling in the squares with a colored pen. But my time in the dark playground is keeping me from getting started on some larger tasks. Adding a second piece of paper to this system is manageable for me at this time.
I'd like an app that will cause my phone to either beep, vibrate, or show an alert on the screen. The intervals will hopefully be not shorter than 45 minutes and not longer than 2 hours, while being random.
Previous questions are older and apps suggested in them are either gone, no longer free, and/or focus on much shorter intervals. I'm not a twitter user, so InnerTwitter isn't going to get the job done, but their random once an hour would be so great if I were a user. I don't spend enough time on my computer for a script of that sort to work as well for me as it seems to work for others.
I don't like being in the dark playground and I think that tracking how many times a day I'm there vs doing the things I want to be doing will help re-organize the reward pathways that my brain has tunneled. I think tracking how often I am not in the dark playground will help my brain build a sense of mastery. So I've created a visual chart* and at each alarm, I'd like write the time in the top of the chart and color in the bubble(s) for what I was doing (two bubbles if I'm knitting AND listening to podcasts), two bubbles if I'm on Metafilter and it's serving as a dark playground, one bubble if it's ... functional/adaptive use of the site.
I could kludge this on my phone alarms, but knowing my brain, it would just potentially say "hey bilabial, the 12:18pm alarm is about to happen and we want the prize for not being in the dark playground. Let's be eating lunch when it rings. Then! We can take the prize to the dark playground!" So that wouldn't be ideal for me.
*I'm already using a bullet journal inspired self made paper habit tracker, and I get a lot of pleasure from filling in the squares with a colored pen. But my time in the dark playground is keeping me from getting started on some larger tasks. Adding a second piece of paper to this system is manageable for me at this time.
I had friends/coworkers set random alarms on my iPod Touch to do what you’re describing.
I just said I wanted 3-6 a day for the next week (during waking hours). Usually took somebody 5 minutes or so to set it up.
Depending on how willing your friends are to go along with this plan, it might work for you.
posted by paulcole at 9:02 PM on April 11, 2018
I just said I wanted 3-6 a day for the next week (during waking hours). Usually took somebody 5 minutes or so to set it up.
Depending on how willing your friends are to go along with this plan, it might work for you.
posted by paulcole at 9:02 PM on April 11, 2018
I was just looking for something like this last week and ended up installing the remindfulness app. I set it to show only my custom reminders, but one can have them show their presumably mindfulness-related ones as well. I hadn't seen any reminders lately, which is explained by the FAQ on their site and is an iOS thing, not specific to the app:
Q. Why have the reminders stopped coming?
It's a limit built into apple's iOS that only 64 notifications can be sent before your device causes the app to stop sending them. Sadly, there is no workaround.
The solution: Just tap the VIEW button on the reminder, or slide the icon to open the reminder in the Remindfulness app at least once every 64 reminders and the iOS will never stop sending them. That's all you have to do! Obviously, if you've set the app to send you a reminder every 5 minutes, you'll have to do this every 5 hours or so -- but if you're doing that many mindfulness practices, you probably won't forget :-)
posted by meijusa at 5:04 AM on April 12, 2018
Q. Why have the reminders stopped coming?
It's a limit built into apple's iOS that only 64 notifications can be sent before your device causes the app to stop sending them. Sadly, there is no workaround.
The solution: Just tap the VIEW button on the reminder, or slide the icon to open the reminder in the Remindfulness app at least once every 64 reminders and the iOS will never stop sending them. That's all you have to do! Obviously, if you've set the app to send you a reminder every 5 minutes, you'll have to do this every 5 hours or so -- but if you're doing that many mindfulness practices, you probably won't forget :-)
posted by meijusa at 5:04 AM on April 12, 2018
This is not exactly what you want, but the Day One app (which is basically a journaling app) lets you set as many timed prompts as you want.
posted by adamrice at 7:20 AM on April 12, 2018
posted by adamrice at 7:20 AM on April 12, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
If so, you could just make the random time be whenever you notice yourself thinking about tracking your habits.
posted by aniola at 8:17 PM on April 11, 2018 [1 favorite]