Meanwhile

About Meanwhile

⌘ An app that asks, at random moments, whether you meant to be doing this. Write down how you mean to spend this time. One line, in your own words. Later, at a moment you can't predict, a card shows you your own words back and asks whether you meant this. You answer yes or not really, and it disappears. Drifting is quiet. You rarely notice the moment you left, which is why a scheduled reminder doesn't catch it: you learn its rhythm, you brace for it, you stop seeing it. Meanwhile never arrives at the same time twice. It cannot be anticipated, so it can't become part of the background. The method comes from psychology. In experience sampling, people are paged at random moments and asked what they're doing. Killingsworth and Gilbert used it to show we spend close to half our waking hours thinking about something other than what we're doing. It's not a timer and not a task list. Nothing is blocked, nothing is timed, nothing is scored. It never asks whether you got anything done, only whether you meant this. There's also a mode with no card at all: just the chime. For when what you mean to return to is already in your head. Over time it leaves you a record of the distance between what you meant and what happened. You can read it yourself, or export it and let an AI tell you what it sees. It lives in the menu bar. What you write stays on your Mac.