I dropped Tameno into last night’s Sunday Serial; admittedly, I’d only farted with the app a little as of that writing, but I was excited to see a new app by Matthias Gansrigler, the creator of one of my favorite Mac apps, Yoink. I used it a bunch today, and I like it more than I thought.

I use the timer on the phone and Apple Watch a lot, but only for a few cases: for making coffee, I often need 30 second and four-minute timers (for blooming a pour over and brewing French Press, if you are curious why), and 10-minute timers for charcoal.

One particular use I found today was working on a low-importance but urgent task at work; I had to unpack some boxes, and I figured I’d only do that for about 20 mins. Sure, I could have asked Siri to set a timer for me; instead, I just asked Tameno to tap me every five minutes. That way, I could keep track of how long I organized and go a little bit longer if I wanted. As predicted, I was only gonna do two Tamenos, but I ended up doing three. And that was helpful: I realized that was my third tap, oriented myself to how long I’d worked / how much time I lost to a mundane but important task (not much) vs what I’d accomplished (I got lots of supplies squared away and more than I thought I would in 15 minutes), and moved on to something more mission-critical. Tameno didn’t holler “Time’s up!” It just gently tapped me every five minutes. (You can, though, have Tameno count down to zero.)

Using Tameno helped me discover its baked-in OS goodies, too. Sure, the main screen offers tappable plus and minus button for your timer, but the power user move is to just swipe up or down (for longer or shorter durations). And it works exactly the same way on the Apple Watch. The one difference is that there’s no visual cue to see your timer history, a feature I consider a must-have on this app. But as you might expect, a long-press on the watch face reveals your (synced) timer histories. Simple but brilliant. Would that you could long press on the iPhone screen for the same feature.

I’m looking forward to using this as a kind of Pomodoro timer, and exploring using it with Siri, as I often tell Siri to “set a timer for 10 minutes” and the like.