Best Timer: It's About Time, It's About ... Focus

I've recently begun reading Clay Johnson's new book, The Information Diet.  Johnson addresses that problem that we all face, namely, our tendency to interrupt ourselves far too often in order to look at email.  He believes that we aren't focusing on the things we need to be focusing on.  If he's right, then we might want to follow his prescription for increasing our ability to focus on the task at hand.

Johnson suggests starting with a timer set for 5 minutes (working on something other than email).  When I thought I would try out Johnson's idea, I realized that I didn't have a good timer that would always be with me.  So I looked around and discovered Best Timer, an iOS app from Smartphoneware.  It's inexpensive, it has a great design, and it does the basic timing functions.  The main screen is a clock, and you can choose from turquoise or red (or spend a little extra to get green, amber, or pink).  You can have your timer look like an hourglass with falling sand, a circular timer, a simple countdown timer, or a stopwatch. 

The alarm itself can be set for a number of pleasing or interesting sounds, with a range of musical types from techno to jazz to heavy metal to acoustic guitar to...well, you get the idea.  By choosing the right sound (and keeping the volume down), you're unlikely to bother your colleagues too much.

Does it work?  Well, I'll let you know as soon as I tend to this backlog of email. 

Event Observer

One of the things we do occasionally is observe the traffic in the Library, trying to determine how long patrons wait for service or the room count for different areas of the Library. Even with a smart phone or tablet that has clock and timer applications, getting good data is cumbersome.

Recently I discovered an iPhone/iPad app called Event Observer, which provides the ability to time or count multiple events at once. The free version (Event Observer Lite), can record the time or count for up to four events. The for fee version, which costs a whopping $0.99, lets the user track up to 10 events.

Event Observer is an interaction analysis tool and it has made my observation tasks much easier. I've set it up to record the wait time for patrons in line at our different service points, the amount of time there weren't any patrons waiting in line, and the amount of time there weren't any patrons at the service point. All I had to do was to create the list of events (also called attributes), indicate whether I wanted to time or count the attributes, then start conducting the observation. If I want to time multiple events simultaneously, Event Observer can do that or if I want to toggle between timers, it can do that too. It is also easy to setup and use for counting the people in a room, the number of students attending instruction or library events, or anything else I'd want to count.

I just began my use of this app, but I think it's going to be a very useful addition to my little toolbox.