Playtime

A command line tool for earning and spending your leisure time. Spend some time doing a more "virtuous" task (e.g. study Chinese for 30 minutes or work on the book for 2 hours) and convert that into minutes you can use later to do something a little less "productive" (like playing computer games or binge watching that new series).

• Playtime
  • Usage
  • Commands
    • playtime add
    • playtime use
    • playtime ls
  • Configuration
    • Config Directory
    • Custom times / time modifiers
  • Inspiration / Concept
  • Development
    • Releasing

Usage

$ npm install -g playtime
$ playtime COMMAND
running command...
$ playtime (-v|--version|version)
playtime/0.0.1 darwin-x64 node-v14.7.0
$ playtime --help [COMMAND]
USAGE
  $ playtime COMMAND
...

Commands

playtime add

Add time spent on an activity in order to earn play time.

$ playtime add
# You'll be prompted to enter a time source and amount of time spent.
> 5 minutes added. 25 minutes of play time now available.

See code: src/commands/add.ts

playtime use

Use play time that you've previously earned.

$ playtime use
# You'll be prompted to enter the time to use
> 5 minutes used. 20 minutes remaining.

See code: src/commands/add.ts

playtime ls

Show how much playtime you've previously earned.

$ playtime ls
> 5 minutes of play time available

See code: src/commands/add.ts

Configuration

Config Directory

The default config directory is ~/.playtime/. You can set a custom directory by adding the following to your shell config:

PLAYTIME_DIR=/whatever/path/you/like

Custom times / time modifiers

By default the times available are 25 minutes, 50 minutes (both inspired by the Pomodoro Technique), and 90 minutes (inspired by Cal Newport's Deep Work). The 90 minutes time has a modifier of 1.5 applied, so an extra 50% of play time is awarded.

You can add custom times (with optional modifiers) by editing the file data.json in the config directory (see the Config Directory section above for more info). You can add a customTimes field to the json with an array of objects containing a minutes field and an optional modifier field. E.g.

{
  "version":1,
  "availableTime":17,
  "timeSources":[{"name":"Study Spanish","modifier":0.2}],
  "customTimes": [
    { "minutes": 30 },
    { "minutes": 60, "modifier": 1.2 }
  ]
}

Inspiration / Concept

Not surprisingly, this app was written on New Year's Eve as I reflected on some of my habits in 2020. Two in particular stuck out. The first was that I was rarely spending my time doing "deep work". Some of this was to blame on externalities - working from home full-time, adapting to having a first child, my day job evolving into more of a management role, etc. - but the biggest difficulty I could identify was that I rarely have a good trigger to start on deep work. When it comes down to the small, well-defined, surface level task vs the large, ill-defined deep work, the former tends to be the default option.

The second issue, was much simpler - I'm really bad at moderating my leisure time! While it's not bad enough to impact my relationships or work life, it does mean that when it comes to a choice between working on a cool side project or playing that new video game, the latter tends to win. I didn't want to quit playing games, and I didn't want to arbitrarily limit myself (I've tried this in the past and it didn't stick), rather I wanted to find a way to bring some sort of balance to how I spend my time.

The objective then of playtime is to pit these two issues against each other in the hope of solving both. Do deep work, enter it into playtime, and it gets transformed into time you can use later for your leisure activities! It's still a somewhat arbitrary cap, but in the past I've found that systemising habits in this way makes me more likely to stick to them. I can't speak to it's efficiency just yet, but I'm hoping I can revisit this sentence in a few months and update it with a postive outcome!

Development

Releasing

Currently releasing is a manual process:

• Create a release branch from main
• Run npm publish
• Merge the branch back into main (the only change should be the version number)