A freelancer wrote to me last week: "Your timer is too quiet. I forget it's running."
That's exactly the point.
The timer as interruption
The tools that came before us — Toggl, Harvest, Clockify — share one idea: your time is a countdown you need to watch. They put the clock in your menu bar. They notify you when you forget to start it. They colour blocks to warn you about overruns.
Those are urgency gestures. And urgency, in small daily doses, eventually colonises your attention.
What we did instead
Sablio makes no noise. No sound, no red badge, no toast, no pop-up when you cross a threshold. The only visible signal is the small green dot inside the app window — and you have to go looking for it.
The idea: you decide when you look. The timer is a tool you consult, not an assistant tugging your sleeve.
It takes a small habit
Two things are needed:
- Build the habit of opening Sablio at the start of a session (we added a global keyboard shortcut,
⌘Kon macOS, to cut the friction). - Accept that you'll sometimes forget. You add a few minutes at the end of the week, and you move on.
It sounds unreliable. In practice, my first six testers bill more time than before — because they were already forgetting with their previous timer, they just didn't know.
Respect, not control
A time tracker that watches you becomes a surveillance tool. That's why we wrote the manifesto. Once you start ringing to "help you stay focused", you're not far from screenshots every ten minutes.
Silence is a political choice.
— Patrick