How to actually get equal-time discipline out of Stream Mode and Build Mode — and the 3-Step Video Deconstruction Framework this timer is built around.
Before you start — picking what you're studying and setting expectations.
The dropdown defaults to Video Lecture / Demo / Tutorial — pick this for anything you're going to rebuild afterward. Two presets, Reading (45m) and the fixed-length activities below, are there for common cases so you don't have to type a title and guess minutes every time.
Type what you're watching or reading, and your best guess at how long it'll take. That number only colors the Stream ring as you approach it — it isn't a cap. You can keep streaming past it, and nothing stops you early either.
Movie (2h) and Exercise – Bike (1h) are both marked "no Recall" — there's nothing to rebuild after watching a film or riding a bike, so stopping the stream logs the session immediately with no Build phase at all.
Stream Mode — where the first two passes of the framework happen.
Both of these happen inside the same Stream Mode timer — the tool doesn't split them into separate phases, that pacing is on you. Watch the whole thing once at 1.5x with no typing, then go back through in 2–3 minute chunks, pausing to build each micro-step from memory before pressing play again.
The ring runs red → green as elapsed time approaches your stated expected length. It's feedback, not a countdown — there's no auto-stop, and going past 100% just holds the ring at full green. Stop whenever you're actually done previewing and coding along, not when the ring says so.
Whatever your real elapsed Stream time was — not your original estimate — becomes the exact length of the Build countdown you're about to get. That's the whole mechanism: you can't shortchange the rebuild by lowballing your estimate up front.
Build Mode — the blind rebuild, locked to exactly the time you just earned.
Open a blank file and rebuild the whole thing with no peeking. The ring now runs green → red as the locked countdown burns down — it's counting down from exactly your Stream time, no more, no less.
Give yourself a genuine 10 minutes with docs or an assistant before backing out. If the countdown reaches zero, the panel advances on its own — you still have to press Log Session to actually save it to history. Nothing is logged automatically just because time ran out.
Stop early — log it anyway still records the session, marked Stopped early in your history, with whatever partial Build time you actually put in. Nothing gets silently discarded — you can delete it afterward from history if you'd rather not keep the record (see Part 4).
Reading your Session History.
Sessions is a raw count. Total consumed and Total built sum every logged Stream and Build duration across your whole history — including "no Recall" sessions, which only add to consumed.
Stream Build
Each bar's width is scaled against your single longest session ever logged, not against a fixed timescale — so a 20-minute session will look small the day after a 3-hour one, and large again once that big one ages out of view (it never does; it just resets the scale every time you log something longer).
Stopped early means the Build phase was cut short — Build time is less than the Stream time that earned it. No Recall marks activities that never had a Build phase to begin with (Movie, Bike). A session can only ever show one of the two.
If you start a new session with the exact same title as one already in your history, that older matching entry dims while your new one is in progress — just a visual flag that you're repeating something, not a duplicate warning you need to act on.
The × delete button only appears once a session is at least 10 minutes old. That's deliberate — it stops you from impulsively deleting a session (like one marked "Stopped early") in the same breath you logged it.