It tolls for thee.

Maybe that's a little grim. What's not grim however is giving the BubbleTimer faithful what they've been asking for. One of the most requested features to date is for BubbleTimer to play a sound every 15 minutes to remind you to bubble in your time. Take a look at the top right corner near the clock when you are looking at today's time (you might need to refresh your page) and you should see the chime option.

It defaults to off but you can turn it on with a click and it remembers when you turn it on and off.

Let me know what you think. Like the sound or find it annoying? It's from the Adium open source instant messaging client.

A bug that prevented users with a period in their email address could not use the sharing feature was also fixed. As part of resolving this, sharing URLs have changed from:

http://bubbletimer.com/users/your-email-address

to:

http://bubbletimer.com/share/your-email-address
  

I apologize for the inconvenience, but please let anyone you are sharing with know about the new URL.

Here is the full "for whom the bell tolls" passage by John Donne from "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623).

"If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

For me, the World is centered around the Southeast United States and radiates outwards from there. Places like New York, Chicago and Dallas are in the world's backyard. California is the next door neighbor. Alaska, Mexico and Canada... they are houses just down the street a little ways. Everything else gets progressively more remote. Australia, New Zealand, Japan? I'm pretty sure they are on this planet but they do seem awfully distant to me.

There is no excuse for this parochialism however. The world is flat and getting flatter after all. That's what makes a bug in BubbleTimer that caused customers in distant time zones to be dropped onto the wrong day all the more embarrassing. This is now fixed. My sincerest apologies go out to all the customers that were affected and my thanks go out to those who took the time to contact me and let me know about the problem.

In celebration of BubbleTimer's improved worldliness, I am going to send the first person to comment to this blog post an Upside Down World Map. Just leave a comment indicating that you are first and I'll contact you to get your address so I can have the map sent.

Picture (c) 1988 Maps International Inc.

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

You know those handful of times in your life when you've read a sentence that is so profound that it hits you like a ton of bricks? You are left very literally gasping for air and dizzy with the words. For me this sentence from the essays of Arthur Schopenhauer is one of those moments.

What an absolutely incredible bit of psychology! My whole life I've been buying way more books then I could ever possibly read. In fact, one of the first tangible insights I had into my own mortality was when I was about 8 or so years old and I calculated how many books I could read in my lifetime at the rate I was reading them (which was prodigeous compared to the rate I have time for today). It was a sobering calculation and it bothered me deeply for many years. In fact, I can still make myself sad about it.

Why do I do it? Why do I continue to buy more books than I will ever have time to read? It's exactly as Schopenhaur says. It's because at the bookstore (or at the moment I'm about to one-click purchase at Amazon) I'm making the wrong calculation in my head. I'm thinking: "Sure, I'd gladly pay $24.95 to have the contents of that book in my head. What a deal!"

What I should be thinking is: "Are the contents of this book in my head worth $24.95 and 12 hours of my life?" I've never thought to ask myself a question like that when buying a book. I think I'd have more money in the bank, fewer unread books on the shelf and less guilt about them if I did.

It's important to know about how fast you read so you can do a quick estimate of how many hours the book will take you. And it's important to get a sense of how you want to be spending the hours in your life and how many hours you want to spend reading.

Many people have heard of Randy Pausch by now. Randy was a computer scientist and author of the speech and book The Last Lecture. Randy's life was tragically cut short by cancer, but in his final days he became a sort of a modern day, layman's existentialist. He traveled the country exhorting people to live in the moment, to go after their dreams, and to stop making excuses and putting off doing what they really want to do.

Randy also had quite a bit to say about time management as he considered it to be a key skill that led to his having a successful life. Many of his speeches on time management were filmed and are now on the Internet. They are all roughly an hour long but I assure you they are well worth your time. Please watch or listen to one. I've extracted a few quotes from the first half of Randy's talk that I hope will convince you to set aside the time to hear Randy's thoughts on time management.

"Americans are very, very bad at dealing with time as a commodity. We're really good with dealing with money as a commodity... but we don't really have time elevated to that. People waste their time."

"The household budget I want to talk about is your household time budget."

"Your time, you can't ever get it back."

"The Time Famine; Bad time management = stress"

Randy the time existentialist - People: "I've got a job but I don't really like." Randy: "Well you COULD CHANGE."

"Being successful does not make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful."

"If you do the right things adequately, that is much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully."

Arthur Schopenhauer, the great philisophical pessimist on time:

"Of every event in our life it is only for a moment that we can say that it is; after that we must say for ever that it was. Every evening makes us poorer by a day. ...Our existence is based solely on the ever-fleeting present. Essentially, therefore, it has to take the form of continual motion without there ever being any possibility of our finding the rest after which we are always striving. It is the same as a man running downhill, who falls if he tries to stop, and it is only by his continuing to run on that he keeps on his legs; it is like a pole balanced on one's finger-tips, or like a planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it stopped hurrying onwards. Hence unrest is the type of existence."

The ever fleeing present... life as a treadmill set on full tilt. What's the prescription for this? Despite being a quintescentially German philosopher (a direct philosophical descendent of Kant) Schopenhauer eventually looked to the East for his answers and found them in the more ancient teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism. It's no surprise that many of the productivity gurus of our own time such as Zen Habits' Leo Babauta have always had an attraction to Buddhism. And even GTD stalwarts like Merlin Mann can find that they want off Schopenhauer's treadmill.

I personally take a more Western approach to this problem. I think a good answer to this problem can be found in the existentialism of the 20th century. I look forward to blogging more about this possibility.

How fast does time seem to go by for you? Does it seem slow, like you're unable to get to that point in the future that you just can't wait to be at? Or does it seem to zip by like an express train? Does it seem to move at a consistent pace for you or does it seem to fluctuate wildly? Does it move at the same pace now as it did at other times in your life? Does it seem to move at the same pace for you as for other people you know? I think these are very interesting questions that deserve attentions from psychologists and philosophers.

Philip Yaffe, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has a very thought provoking article in which he asks the question, how come time seems to go faster and faster as we get older? Philip's conclusion is that the reason for this widely reported phenomenon is that anticipation slows down the perception of time while retrospection makes time seem to go more quickly. While we are young we spend a good deal of time anticipating our future and while we are older we spend a much greater percentage of time in retrospection about our pasts.

I'm more convinced by Philip's idea that anticipation can slow the perception of time. After all, every American remembers how long Christmas Eve night seemed when they were 5 years old. I'm less convinced though that retrospection accelerates the perception of time. That doesn't seem to fit my own phenomenology as well as the former idea. I'd rather parsimoniously claim that it's simply less time spent in anticipation that results in the perception of time going more quickly in older age. This seems to be an inadequately explored area. Given the importance of time to us mortal humans, the psychology of how we think about time is very important and deserves a lot more work.

Here we go. Liftoff. This is launch week for BubbleTimer and my tiny team and I are scrambling to put the last polishing touches on a few things. The time charting has been a bit of a nusaince for a few weeks. Still trying to get it just right.

I've put off creating the product tour but now it's time. No more procrastination. I have the text all set, just need to take all the screenshots. I'm a perfectionist about screenshots so I'm not looking forward to it since I know it will be a time sink of epic porportions.

The final design elements are in place including the product logo which was sourced from a design contest at 99 Designs. What a fun and smooth process that was. I highly reccommend the crowd sourcing approach to anyone needing some design work. crowdSPRING is another option similar to 99 Designs that I haven't tried out yet but I will soon.

There are a couple of tweeks to the billing, printing and exporting and then we'll be launched. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will be relatively smooth. I'm keeping all the rest of my body parts crossed that BubbleTimer will prove useful to you. I've been using it for months now and I find it an indespensible part of keeping my life on track. I hope you will too.