Time Narrator

Time Narrator is a background service for the Sway window manager that periodically tells you the time and summarizes your recent activity. It's a tool designed to foster time awareness and mindful computing without interrupting your workflow.

The Benefit of Audible Feedback

In the age of deep work and digital immersion, it's easy to lose track of time. You might sit down to work on a small task, only to find that hours have passed by unnoticed. Time Narrator aims to solve this by providing gentle, ambient, and audible feedback.

• Maintain Time Awareness: By narrating the time at semi-random intervals, the tool helps you build a better internal clock. This can improve time management and prevent you from spending unintended amounts of time on a single task.
• Promote Mindful Computing: The activity summary encourages a moment of reflection. Hearing "In the past 20 minutes, you were working on Project X" reinforces that you're on track, while hearing "you weren't at your computer" can be a useful reminder of your breaks. It provides a low-friction form of accountability.
• Reduce Distractions: Unlike visual notifications, audible alerts don't require you to shift your visual focus. You can continue typing, reading, or designing while the narrator speaks, keeping you in your flow state.

Prerequisites

Before installing, you need to have the following installed on your system:

• Sway and swayidle: The tool is built specifically for the Sway environment.
• TTS Engine: espeak-ng or piper or other.. You pick the comand.

Installation

uvx time-narrator

Configuration

uv run time-narrator --write-default-config

This will create a new file at ~/.config/time-narrator/config.toml.

Options

• tts_command: The shell command used to speak text. The script pipes the narration text to this command's standard input.
  • Example #1: tts_command = "espeak-ng"
  • Example #2 (higher quality): tts_command = "piper --model /path/to/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx --output-file - | pw-play"
• base_interval_sec: The base interval for reminders, in seconds. (Default: 600, i.e., 10 minutes).
• random_window_sec: A window to add or subtract from the base interval, in seconds. (Default: 300, i.e., +/- 5 minutes). This means reminders will occur every 5 to 15 minutes.
• idle_threshold_sec: The number of seconds of inactivity before you are considered "idle". (Default: 60).

Usage

Launching from sway config

exec time-narrator