This is not a list of tips. It is the sequence, and it runs here: you write the one thing you are going to do, you start a block of time, and when it ends you answer one question. After three or four of them you stop guessing about your own day and start reading it.
One sentence, not a project. If it does not fit in a line it is too big to start now, and that is usually the actual reason it has not started.
Until the clock runs out, nothing else. Whatever you would write on a separate note can wait.
Did you do it?
There is no wrong answer here, and no streak to protect. A list where everything is a yes is a list that tells you nothing.
What you type and what you answer stay in this browser, on this device. Nothing is sent to us, there is no account, and closing the tab does not lose today's list. Clearing your browsing data does.
A to-do list records intentions. This records what happened to them, which is a different and less comfortable thing. The whole difference sits in the last step: the list ends with a tick you give yourself, this ends with a question you have to answer.
And it holds one task on purpose. A list of twelve is a decision you have to take again every time you look up, and the item that gets picked is rarely the one that has been waiting longest. One sentence, decided before the clock starts, is a decision taken once.
The thing you have been putting off is almost never the whole project. It is the first twenty-five minutes of it.
That is also why the field is one line long. «Finish the thesis» cannot start now, so it never starts. «Write the first page of chapter two» can start in the next minute, and once it has started the rest is no longer the thing you are avoiding: it is the thing you are already doing.
One caution, said plainly. We cannot tell you this will stop you putting things off, and nobody honestly can. What a week of these records can tell you is something narrower and more useful: at which hour your yeses happen, and what the noes have in common.
There is one more step that is hard to do alone, and it is the one this page cannot give you: saying the sentence out loud to somebody. In WeFocusBuddy a session starts with exactly that. You book a quarter of an hour, one other person who booked the same one appears on a video call, each of you says in a sentence what you are about to do, and then the microphones go quiet and you both work until the time is up.
Rooms open every fifteen minutes, day and night. Nothing to say afterwards, nobody checking on you: the whole weight of it is in the sentence at the beginning and in the fact that someone heard it.
Reading the clock…
We cannot tell you that, and nobody honestly can. What this page does is describe a sequence and run it: one task, one block, one answer at the end. Whether it changes anything for you is something a week of records answers better than any article, this one included.
Nowhere. The task and the answers stay in this browser, on this device, and go away when you clear your browsing data. Nothing reaches us and there is no account.
It gets recorded as a no, and that is the point. After a few days the noes usually have more in common than the yeses do: the same hour, the same kind of task, the same length that was too long.
It is not a list of everything: it holds the one task you are doing now, and it ends with a question instead of a tick. A list records intentions; this records what happened to them.
Yes. Nothing on this page assumes a student: a block of time with a name on it works the same for a report, a tax return or a drawing.