This is a 5-minute timer with a textarea that becomes readonly when the timer runs off. This might be useful for people doing resolve cycles, or people telling other people about resolve cycles!
(You can just link them to the page and say “Go to this site and solve your problem in five minutes!“)
[Programming related remarks below]
I also took this as an opportunity to experiment with React state management, as the main App class started to get pretty big. Ended up implementing something akin to Redux, but in a way I think could be made type-safe if built with Flow or TypeScript. I would like to hear about any library that implements something like what I tried here (I’d bet it already exists).
If you want to take a look, the source is MIT-licensed at: https://github.com/gusbicalho/fiveminutetimer.
Comments about the source code can be posted here, or as an issue in the Github repo, or in the version of this post in my personal website (which I’m shamelessly using this as an excuse to promote).
Just wanted to give a props for making a thing.
I gave it a try for brainstorming in this thread here. I found (as I often do) that 5 minutes is just enough time for me to get out all my cached thoughts and only barely start thinking for real. My general experience is that it takes me 25 minutes or so to get real thinking done, but if I tell myself I’ll spend 25 minutes on something I’m less likely to do it than if I claim to myself it’ll only take 5.
(this is most relevant if I’m doing a thing that really requires novel thinking)
I’ll experiment with setting 10 minute timers and committing to sticking to them.