And I need some too.

All kidding aside, I do love education, so now all students and educators that signup with a .edu email address will get a 40% discount on BubbleTimer for the year. Enjoy! I hope it helps you stay focused on the things that matter to you as a student or teacher, and as a person.

Thank you to Dr. Tang of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical  for prodding me to do this.

I recently fielded an email from a BubbleTimer user (a Bubbler?) asking about filling in more than 1 bubble for a given 15 minute time slot. Long time BubbleTimer users will remember that BubbleTimer launched without this feature, but it has it now, so my answer was to hold down the modifier key (Alt or Option) when selecting the 2nd and subsequent bubbles.

I didn't include this feature originally because I didn't want to encourage multi-tasking and I didn't want to encourage obsessing on getting time tracked to a fine precision. I was later convinced to add it by a compelling argument from the user community. Despite all the scientific research on the folly of multi-tasking, there are a relatively small number of cases where multi-tasking is a reasonable and good behavior. Listening to an audio lecture while exercising was the example that finally swayed me.

The emailer replied back saying the multi-asking worked, but asking why the 15 minute time slot wasn't subdivided between the tasks that got the simultaneous bubbles. If you bubble the "Listen to Lectures" activity and the "Exercise" activity for the same slot, they each get 15 minutes rather than one getting 7.5 minutes and the other getting 7.5 minutes. The reason for this, is the multiple bubbles are meant to represent multi-tasking. You did them both for 15 minutes! The feature is not meant to be a way to cheat and track your time in increments of less than 15 minutes.

It's an often asked question, but I don't have any plans to support tracking time in less than 15 minute increments. BubbleTimer is intentionally opinionated software, designed for helping you get the big picture on how your time is being spent with the absolute minimum amount of fuss and time spent on time management. It's not a good tool for obsessing over the details on whether you spent 15 min. on something or 7.5 min or 3 minutes on something. There are lots of good time management apps that focus on precision, accuracy, and timing activities down to the minute or to the second, but that's not the goal for BubbleTimer.

So... in summary... if you spend a fraction of 15 minutes on an activity instead of 15 minutes... it's not going to change your opinion on what's important:

How did I spend my time this week?

Am I happy about that? How does it compare with how I said I wanted to spend my time?

How will I spend my time next week and what needs to change to make me happier about how I'll spend next week?

And that my friends, is what BubbleTimer is all about!