I’ve used the Pomodoro technique for over 20 years, from my time as an engineer at NASA to leading teams at Red Hat. Throughout that time, I’ve found that most timer apps are "data silos"—your focus history is locked behind a proprietary API or a subscription model.
I built Acquacotta to solve the "audit" problem. It’s a minimalist, open-source timer that treats your productivity like a data science project.
The Architecture: Instead of a traditional backend, Acquacotta logs every session in real-time directly to your own Google Sheet.
Offline-First: It uses a local SQLite cache so the UI is never blocked by network latency to the Google API.
Data Sovereignty: You own the infrastructure and the schema. You can run your own pivot tables, regressions, or pipe the data into an LLM for a performance audit without ever "exporting" a CSV.
No Commercial Version: This is purely a passion project. There is no "Pro" tier or tracking.
Key Features for Power Users:
Acoustic Focus: An optional "60 Minutes" style ticking sound that acts as a Pavlovian trigger for flow states.
Physical Timer Support: A dedicated mode to manually (but quickly) log sessions from tactile hardware like Hexagon timers.
Sustainability Metrics: Visual "Daily Minute Goals" designed to prevent the "heroics-to-burnout" cycle by helping you find your "Goldilocks zone" of output.
I built this because I wanted a professional-grade audit log of my career, not just a series of alarms.
fatherlinnux•1mo ago
I built Acquacotta to solve the "audit" problem. It’s a minimalist, open-source timer that treats your productivity like a data science project.
The Architecture: Instead of a traditional backend, Acquacotta logs every session in real-time directly to your own Google Sheet.
Offline-First: It uses a local SQLite cache so the UI is never blocked by network latency to the Google API.
Data Sovereignty: You own the infrastructure and the schema. You can run your own pivot tables, regressions, or pipe the data into an LLM for a performance audit without ever "exporting" a CSV.
No Commercial Version: This is purely a passion project. There is no "Pro" tier or tracking.
Key Features for Power Users:
Acoustic Focus: An optional "60 Minutes" style ticking sound that acts as a Pavlovian trigger for flow states.
Physical Timer Support: A dedicated mode to manually (but quickly) log sessions from tactile hardware like Hexagon timers.
Sustainability Metrics: Visual "Daily Minute Goals" designed to prevent the "heroics-to-burnout" cycle by helping you find your "Goldilocks zone" of output.
I built this because I wanted a professional-grade audit log of my career, not just a series of alarms.
GitHub: https://github.com/fatherlinux/Acquacotta
Hosted Web App: https://acquacotta.crunchtools.com:8443
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the "Sheets-as-a-backend" approach for small-scale personal telemetry.