Peter Gollwitzer, NYU. The foundational paper is "Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans" (1999, American Psychologist).

Forming a specific if-then plan — "When X happens, I will do Y, in Z place" — increases follow-through on intentions by 200–300% compared to simply deciding to do something. The mechanism is that the plan creates a mental link between a situational cue and a behavior, so the action becomes semi-automatic when the cue appears.

Every task has optional fields for First action, When, Where, Obstacle, and Backup plan. These are not organizational metadata — they are the if-then structure Gollwitzer identified. "When I sit down after breakfast at my desk, I will open the doc and write one sentence" is an implementation intention. "Work on the course" is not.

The fields are opt-in because Gollwitzer's research also shows that low-stakes tasks don't benefit much from this structure. For quick errands, a title is enough. The depth is reserved for tasks you keep not doing.

Three streams.

Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan): intrinsic motivation and follow-through are stronger when a behavior is connected to a value or goal the person actually holds, rather than performed as an external obligation. Reconnecting a task to why it matters to you re-activates that intrinsic link.

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions, MCII (Gabriele Oettingen): pairing a vivid statement of the desired future/value with a concrete plan produces stronger follow-through than planning alone. Implementation intentions are the "how" half of MCII; naming what matters is the "why" half.

Values affirmation (Cohen & Sherman, and the broader self-affirmation literature): briefly connecting a task to a core personal value, before the task itself, measurably reduces the threat response that avoidance is often a symptom of. It doesn't remove the discomfort — it changes the frame you meet it in.

Implementation intentions (see above) solve "I don't know how to start" — they assume the goal is already motivationally active. For high-avoidance tasks, that assumption doesn't hold. The bottleneck there is "I don't want to face the feelings associated with this task." Values affirmation and mental contrasting address that second bottleneck directly, by putting the reason the task matters in front of you at the moment resistance is highest.

Every task has an optional "This matters because" field — one sentence, specific and emotionally real, not a mission statement. It sits at the top of the intention panel, above the implementation-intention fields, because the affirmation has to land before the plan does.

The field is deliberately most prominent in focus mode: it appears on the pick screen, before the timer starts, between the task title and the first action — the exact threshold moment when avoidance is highest and a values reminder is most likely to change what happens next. It's absent entirely if you haven't filled it in; the app never prompts for it or shows a placeholder there, because an empty affirmation is not an affirmation.

Gollwitzer's work on goal shielding and intention strength. Also relevant: Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) on self-imposed deadlines and commitment devices.

Implementation intentions need to be formed fresh to be maximally effective. A carried-over intention that you didn't consciously re-commit to is significantly weaker than one formed today. The act of choosing "this is my priority right now, today" is part of what activates the goal.

The frog (your most important task) carries its title across days but its intention fields — first action, when, where, obstacle, and backup plan — reset each morning when you submit your morning check-in. You see the task title as a reminder, but you must re-plan the execution. The morning form also shows "Current frog: [title] — still the right one?" so the recommitment is conscious, not passive.

The frog concept itself is adapted from Brian Tracy's "Eat That Frog" — the idea that the task you most want to avoid is usually the one that matters most.

Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intentions research (1999) — the same specificity finding already cited under Morning check-in ("one thing with a plan beats three things without one").

A visible list that grows past what's achievable stops functioning as a plan and starts functioning as a backlog wearing a "today" label. Forcing a small, deliberately incomplete set converts the day's noise into a short list you're actually choosing from — same mechanism as the morning check-in's singular "one thing" field, applied to the whole Today view.

Today shows a hard cap of frog + 3 regular tasks. New tasks default to "Later." Attempting to add a 5th prompts moving something to Later first, instead of silently letting the list grow.

Gollwitzer's if-then planning. Also: Roy Baumeister's work on decision fatigue and ego depletion (though the specific "glucose" mechanism has been contested, the broader finding that decision-making quality degrades through the day is robust).

Planning done at the start of the day, before decision fatigue sets in, produces better outcomes than planning done reactively. Committing to one specific thing in writing strengthens the intention more than mental planning alone.

Four fields.

"What's actually true right now" — grounds the check-in in reality rather than aspiration. Prevents the common pattern of setting ambitious intentions from an idealized state that doesn't match your actual energy or circumstances.

"One thing that would move something meaningful forward" — forces prioritization before the day fragments into reactive tasks. Deliberately singular: the research on implementation intentions shows specificity matters. One thing with a plan beats three things without one.

"What am I avoiding, and is it costing me" — directly from Nir Eyal's Indistractable framework. Naming an avoidance pattern in writing reduces its power. The act of externalizing "I'm avoiding the course because it makes me feel exposed" is itself an intervention.

"Today's commitment" — a written pre-commitment. Ariely & Wertenbroch's research shows self-imposed deadlines improve performance when they're binding. Writing "Today I will X by Y time" creates a mild commitment device.

Nir Eyal, Indistractable (2019). Also: Bluma Zeigarnik's effect (1927) — unfinished tasks occupy working memory and create cognitive load until they are either completed or deliberately set aside.

Without a deliberate closing ritual, work bleeds into evening not because you're productive but because your mind never received a clear signal that the day ended. The Zeigarnik effect means open loops — unfinished tasks, unresolved decisions — continue drawing cognitive resources even when you're not working.

Three fields.

"What actually happened today" — retrospective reflection. James Pennebaker's expressive writing research shows that writing about what happened — not just what you planned — improves pattern recognition about your own behavior over time.

"What am I avoiding that I need to name before I close" — the shutdown version of the morning avoidance question. Setting it down in writing is the Zeigarnik intervention: you externalize the open loop so your brain can release it.

"First thing tomorrow I will" — tomorrow's seed. Pre-deciding the first action for the next day eliminates the startup cost of beginning. The next morning, the decision is already made.

"Tomorrow's movement" — the same mechanism applied to physical action. Pre-deciding tomorrow's movement during shutdown is a direct application of Gollwitzer's implementation intention research. The decision is made when the person is reflective and tomorrow is abstract. The next morning, finding the movement already chosen eliminates the negotiation that occurs when tired. This is the same principle as the "first thing tomorrow" seed field — the choice pre-fills the next morning's tomorrow-seed card, so the decision only has to be made once.

James Pennebaker, University of Texas. His foundational work "Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions" (1990) and subsequent papers, including "Expressive Writing in Psychological Science" (2018).

Writing about emotional experiences — including the experience of avoiding a task, feeling stuck, or noticing patterns in your own behavior — has measurable effects on cognitive processing and self-understanding. People who write about difficult experiences show better pattern recognition about their own behavior over time. Critically, the benefit comes from writing about what actually happened and how you felt, not from writing polished reflections.

Each task has a notes feed with timestamped entries. The prompt — "What happened? What got in the way? What did you notice?" — is deliberately open and low-stakes. You are not writing for anyone. The accumulated notes on a task become a longitudinal record of your relationship with that piece of work. Over weeks, patterns emerge: which conditions help, what triggers avoidance, whether the fear is decreasing.

The notes are append-only and sorted chronologically. This is intentional — it preserves the temporal data that makes patterns visible.

Two streams.

Nir Eyal's Indistractable framework: distraction is not a feature of the environment, it's a response to internal discomfort. The phone or the other tab is not the cause of distraction — the discomfort that preceded reaching for it is. Managing distraction requires managing the internal trigger, not just the external one.

Urge surfing (from Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention, Bowen et al.): a technique where instead of acting on an urge or suppressing it, you observe it — name it, note its intensity, watch it peak and subside. The act of naming an urge reduces its pull.

The distraction log during a focus session is an implementation of urge surfing. When you feel the pull to check something, you type it instead of doing it. "I want to check Instagram." That act — naming the urge, externalizing it — is the intervention. It converts the urge from something that redirects behavior into something you observe.

The live counter ("3 noticed") and the end-of-session recap ("You noticed: check email, check Instagram, look up bedding") serve a specific function: they make the invisible visible. You can see, concretely, what pulled at you. Over sessions this data shows which tasks trigger which urges, and at what frequency.

The button says "noticed" rather than "resisted" because the framing matters. Pennebaker's expressive writing work and urge surfing research both show that the intervention is awareness, not suppression. "Noticed" is accurate whether you acted on the urge or not. "Resisted" implies you didn't act on it, which would discourage logging urges you did act on — losing half the data.

Micro-break meta-analysis (Albulescu, Grant, Bacigalupo, & Woolley, 2022, PLOS ONE, "Give me a break!") — 22 samples, reliable improvement in vigor and reduced fatigue from brief breaks, though not a reliable improvement in performance on cognitively demanding work. Also brief mindfulness induction research showing a small positive effect on cognitive functioning, with acknowledged methodological limitations across the underlying studies.

The evidence for micro-breaks and brief mindfulness resets is real but modest — don't oversell it. The honest claim is: when overwhelmed, activated, fatigued, or repeatedly avoiding, deliberately changing state may make re-engagement easier. That's not a strong causal claim, but it's a reasonable premise to build a lightweight, optional feature around and test directly against your own data.

Center is a deliberate escape hatch from avoidance back into intentional choice — not a wellness feature, not a habit tracker, and never a task. It doesn't recommend a "best" practice; it offers three, logs which one you pick and what happens after, and lets your own data answer which intervention actually gets you back to work, rather than settling that by theory alone.

Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) on commitment devices. Also: the broader literature on implementation intentions and "if-then" planning for setbacks.

A seamless extension of a time commitment (adding more time without a new decision) undermines the commitment device. The timer becomes a suggestion rather than a constraint. However, genuine underestimation of task duration is common and shouldn't be punished — it should trigger a new, conscious commitment.

When a session ends, you choose between done, partial, or need more time. "Need more time" doesn't silently extend the session — it saves the current session and starts a fresh 5-minute block. You make a new decision. The psychological cost of that decision is small, but it's real, and it's what makes the timer meaningful rather than decorative.

Ecological Momentary Assessment (Csikszentmihalyi; Stone & Shiffman, 1994): capturing behavior at the moment it occurs produces more accurate data than retrospective recall. Also: temporal self-appraisal theory (Wilson & Ross, 2001) — looking back at yourself from a small temporal distance produces more accurate self-assessment than in-the-moment judgment.

A sequential record of what actually happened — not what you planned or what you remember — reveals patterns invisible day-to-day. The value is not in any single entry but in the accumulation over time: which tasks you focus on, when you quit sessions early, which distractions appear repeatedly, how often shutdown reflections mention the same thing.

The log tab shows a chronological activity stream grouped by day, with every meaningful action timestamped: morning check-in (including what you named as avoidance), task additions, task completions and un-completions, frog selection, focus sessions and their outcomes, distraction counts, task notes, quick notes, and shutdown reflections. A quick-note input at the top lets you log an observation in real time without needing to attach it to a task.

Morning entries show the "What am I avoiding" field as subtext — making the avoidance pattern visible alongside everything else that happened that day.

The log export generates this as structured Markdown, suitable for pasting into a monthly review in any writing tool.