Same Clock, Different Intent

About a month ago, I removed elapsed time from the focused task. I built it as an opt-in preference, defaulted OFF. The reason was pressure: putting a ticking counter next to something I’ve explicitly chosen to focus on doesn’t help me focus — it nags.

Today I put that same counter into the ActiveNowTaskBar. Default ON, no toggle. Opposite decisions, one month apart. I want to write down why both feel right.

Two Slots, Two Identities

Fecit has two slots at the top of the task list where a task can be lifted out.

The focused slot holds a task the user has actively chosen. It’s a declaration: “this is what I’m working on now.” The pressure to do it is already inside the user. Adding an external counter pulls the eye every time a minute ticks over, and the actual work suffers.

The active now slot is different. It’s surfaced automatically by the schedule — a timetable entry whose time has come. The user didn’t put it there; the calendar did. The user looks at the bar and thinks, “ah, this is what’s now.” The two natural questions in that moment are:

• How long has this time slot been running? (= am I late?)
• How much is left? (= do I need to wrap up?)

The active now bar is fundamentally a notification about the present moment. Without time information, that notification is only half-working.

Same Data, Different Intent

The same data (elapsed milliseconds) is a burden in one place and core context in another, because the user’s intent in arriving there is different.

• Focused: active, user-declared. → An external counter is pressure.
• Active now: passive, schedule-surfaced. → Time is part of the context.

Once I had that framed, the toggle question answered itself. A toggle implies it’s worth pondering whether to enable; but the active now bar without time is genuinely thinner. There was no reason to keep it opt-in.

Two Values, One Slot

Small problem: sometimes the user wants elapsed, sometimes remaining. It depends on the kind of slot.

• A meeting: the end time matters more → “Left 12m”
• A workout: how long you’ve been at it matters more → “Elapsed 18m”

I tried showing both — “Elapsed 18m · Left 12m” — but in a 24px bar with 12px text it became visually heavy, and parsing two numbers at a glance was harder than parsing one. So one value at a time, tap to flip.

Default is elapsed — it matches best with the “now is happening” framing of the active now label itself. Tap flips to remaining. The next time you open the screen, it starts on elapsed again. I didn’t persist the toggle state: starting from the same answer every time has lower learning cost than guessing what the previous session was on.

Short Labels

"Elapsed 1h 23m", "Left 45m". The longhand “Elapsed time: 1 hour 23 minutes” wouldn’t fit in a 24px bar at 12px. h/m reads instantly in both English and Korean, and the shorter the label, the more the numbers themselves stand out. I also set fontVariant: ["tabular-nums"] so the column doesn’t jitter when the minute updates.

Looking Back

Where to put a piece of information feels like a design decision, but it’s really a question about how the user got to that screen. When two slots look like “similar emphasis slots,” it’s tempting to make their policies match — but once how active the user’s intent was becomes the axis, opposite decisions land naturally.

Next time I’m deciding where a piece of information belongs, the first question won’t be whether the two screens look alike. It’ll be how the user arrived there.