The sleep timer you can start half-asleep

The hardest part of timing a sleep is that you have to start before you know it is one.

A baby goes quiet around eleven at night and you are standing in the dark doing the maths every tired parent does. Is this it. Is this the long stretch you have been hoping for since dinner, or a ten-minute tease that ends the moment you sit down. You cannot know yet. But if you wait to find out, you have already lost the start of it.

So Wriggler's sleep timer is built for the not-knowing. You tap once, before you are sure, and it begins to count.

One tap, then almost nothing to do

The timer is the free part, and it is deliberately almost nothing to operate. You tap start, before you are sure, and a number begins to climb on the home screen. That is the whole interaction. There is no sleep to name, no rating to give, no question to answer first.

When the baby stirs, you tap stop. Wriggler keeps the length, marks it on the day, and goes quiet again. No fanfare about a nap well timed. It just holds the number so you do not have to, which is the kind thing to do at an hour when you would not remember it otherwise.

Lock the phone and the count carries on. Put the phone down, deal with the night, and an hour later the timer is still counting, even if the app was closed along the way. The running count sits on the lock screen too, so checking on it does not even mean opening the app.

That is the design brief for the whole thing, really: a button you can press correctly while half-asleep, in the dark, with one thumb.

For the times you miss the start

You will miss the start sometimes. Everyone does. The baby goes down, you are too far gone to reach for the phone, and forty minutes later you surface and realise the timer was never running.

Wriggler assumes this will happen, because it does. So the live timer is not the only way in. You can enter a sleep after the fact, setting roughly when it started and how long it ran, and it lands on the day exactly as a timed one would. The timer is there for when you catch it. The manual entry is there for when you do not. Neither is the proper way; they are two doors into the same quiet record.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. An app that only let you time sleeps live would quietly punish you for the nights you were too tired to press a button, which are precisely the nights worth remembering. Wriggler would rather you got the sleep down however you can, late and approximate, than not at all.

Nap or night, and nothing more

A sleep in Wriggler is marked as a nap or a night. That is the only label the app puts on it, and it is barely a judgment, just enough that the day reads sensibly and a long stretch in the afternoon does not get filed next to a long stretch at midnight.

What Wriggler does not do is tell you whether the sleep was good. It does not know. There is no target length on the screen, no green tick for a nap that ran long enough, no quiet disappointment for one that did not. How much sleep a baby needs, and what any particular night means, is a conversation for you and the people who actually know your baby. The timer just counts. The meaning stays yours.

What it adds up to

By morning you have a row of sleeps, timed or typed, napped or nighted, sitting next to the feeds and the nappies and the rest of the night you only half remember. Not a verdict. Just the shape of it, in numbers that are yours, ready for whenever you next have two hands and a clearer head.

The sleeps you keep also teach Wriggler your baby's usual rhythm. The wake-window guide on the home screen is built from them, your baby's own recent weeks blended with the Cleveland Clinic's age ranges, and that is a story for another note.

The wombat would approve of the timer, if wombats approved of things. One tap, no fuss, the quiet work of the night done and kept. Then back to the dark, and the waiting, and the small warm weight that has, for now, gone still.