Meridian

About Meridian

Chinese medicine divides the day into twelve two-hour periods called shíchen. Each is governed by a different organ meridian, said to be at its peak during that window. The liver does its repair work around 2am. The stomach is at full strength at 8. The mind reaches a second, quieter peak in the late afternoon. Meridian puts one character in your menu bar — the glyph for the hour you are currently in. Click it and you get what that hour is for: the organ at work, one sentence on what the body is doing, one thing worth doing, one thing worth avoiding. Below that, all twelve hours as a single strip, so you can see the shape of your day at a glance. The colours in that strip repeat, and that is the point. Two hours share the same green because both are deep-focus windows. Two share gold because both are hours to ease off. Read left to right, the strip tells you where your focus windows sit and where the day is asking you to stop. ON TRADITION, HONESTLY This is a cultural framework, not a medical claim, and I have kept it deliberately conservative. The popular “organ detox schedule” that circulates online is not found in the classical texts and is not supported by modern medicine. Meridian does not use it. Where a traditional claim is experiential rather than verified — the idea that Qi rises to the brain in the late afternoon, for example — it stays what it is: a suggestion about when to schedule hard thinking, not a statement about physiology. Nothing here diagnoses, treats, or prescribes anything. What survives that pruning is still worth having: a very old, very specific opinion about when to eat, when to think hard, and when to stop. It is here because it is a good opinion, not because it is ancient. WHY A MENU BAR APP Most tools for your time help you fit more into a day. This one does the opposite. It comes out of a larger project of mine called RhythmOS, built on a single idea: don’t fill the day — put the right thing in the right hour. Meridian is the smallest possible version of that idea. It does not manage your tasks, sync your calendar, or ask you to plan anything. It just tells you what hour it is, in a sense your calendar does not know about. No account. No network requests. Nothing leaves your Mac. It works on a plane.