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Timebox

Timebox is a timer script that may be used to practice timeboxing.

The Windows script has been tested on Windows 7 only. However, it should work fine on other recent versions of Windows too.

The Unix script has been tested with bash, ksh and zsh on Debian and macOS as well as with dash, posh and yash on Debian. It should work fine on any Linux distribution as well as any POSIX compliant system with a POSIX compliant shell.

Introduction
Features
Get Started
Beeps
Logs
Configuration
License
Support

Introduction

Timeboxing is a time management technique that is believed to boost productivity by limiting the time during which a task is supposed to be completed. A time box is a fixed period of time alloted for a task or activity. The period of time to spend on the task is decided first. One time box may last anywhere between 15 minutes to 45 minutes. The duration of a time box may depend on the task or activity. Alternatively, the task may be scoped in a manner that it can be completed in a fixed size time box. Then a timer is started with the decided time interval. Once the timer notifies that the time interval has expired, any activity or work on the task is stopped, and a short break is taken before beginning another time box.

This project offers scripts for Windows as well as Unix that may be used to run a time box for a specified duration.

Features

Runs in Windows Command Prompt or Linux/Unix/macOS shell.
Boring user experience.
No frills.
No ~~bells and~~ whistles. Actually, there are bells (printf "\a"). See Beeps for details.
Logs completed time boxes to a file named timebox.log in the user's home directory.

Get Started

Timebox is a single-file executable script.

Download timebox.cmd for Windows, or timebox for Linux, Unix, or macOS.

Copy it to a directory specified in the PATH environment variable. On Linux/Unix/macOS, make the script executable: chmod u+x timebox.

To run a 30 minute time box, run the script without any arguments:

timebox

The script accepts an integer argument that specifies the duration of the time box in minutes. For example, the following command also runs a 30 minute time box:

timebox 30

The following command runs a 15 minute time box:

timebox 15

The time at which a time box ends and its duration is written to %userprofile%\timebox.log on Windows and ~/timebox.log on Linux/Unix/macOS at the end of a time box.

The following command runs a 30 minute box with a text comment that is recorded in the log file when the time box ends.

timebox 30 write essay

To learn more about the usage of the script, run the following command.

timebox --help

After the script starts, it displays a countdown starting with the specified duration to 0. The countdown is displayed at the beginning of a time box and whenever the number of minutes remaining in the time box is a multiple of 5. On Windows, the time remaining is also displayed in the title bar of the Command Prompt window; the title bar is updated every minute.

Here is how a typical session looks on the terminal:

$ timebox
15:38:24 - 30
15:43:24 - 25
15:48:24 - 20
15:53:24 - 15
15:58:24 - 10
16:03:24 - 05
16:08:24 - 00
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
$

Apart from writing to standard output as shown above, the script also beeps a few times. The beeping behaviour is explained in the next section.

Beeps

Two beeps are played at the beginning of a time box. If the duration of the time box is longer then 15 minutes, one beep is played when 15 minutes are remaining in the time box. If the duration of the time box is longer than 5 minutes, two beeps are played when 5 minutes are remaining in the time box. Four beeps are played at the end of a time box. A dialog box with smileys is displayed for ten seconds at the end of a time box.

Configuration

The behaviour of the script can be tweaked a little bit with a configuration file at ~/.timeboxrc, i.e., %userprofile%\.timeboxrc on Windows and $HOME/.timeboxrc on Linux/Unix/macOS.

The script recognizes the following keywords (configuration options) in the configuration file.

quiet - Do not beep in the middle of a time box. Without this option, the script beeps once when 15 minutes are left and twice more when 5 minutes are left. This can be distracting on macOS where the beeps cause the icon for the terminal running the script to bounce in the Dock. With this configuration option, the beeps occur only at the start and the end of a time box.
sober - Display the message "EOT" instead of smileys when a time box ends.

A configuration keyword may occur anywhere in the configuration file. The only requirement is that the keyword must appear as a word, i.e., it must either occur at the beginning of a line or follow a whitespace character and it must also either occur at the end of a line or followed by a whitespace character. Therefore, multiple configuration keywords may occur in the same line or on different lines. Any text in the configuration file that is not a configuration keyword is ignored.

License

This is free and open source software. You can use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of it, under the terms of the MIT License. See LICENSE.md for details.

This software is provided "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, express or implied. See LICENSE.md for details.

Support

To report bugs, suggest improvements, or ask questions, please create a new issue at http://github.com/susam/timebox/issues.