What's happening right now?
Whichever one fits right now. They each go somewhere different.
Stuck on something
Nothing's landing
Night
Why this and not a points system
Streaks and coins stop working in about four days, because an abstract number going up is not a reward an ADHD dopamine system reliably answers to — and once you break the streak, the app becomes a thing you're avoiding too. The bottleneck was never knowing or wanting. It's the gap between deciding and moving. So this only ever works on that gap.
On hyperfocus specifically: it can't be summoned by wanting it, and any app that says otherwise is selling you something. It's a state with entry conditions — a challenge tuned to a narrow band, feedback fast enough to feel, a visible finish line, and no available exits. What you can do is build those conditions on purpose instead of waiting for a task to happen to have them. That's what the score, the dial and the sound floor are for.
- Games: stop before it goes flat, not after
- The same theory runs backwards for something you already want to do. A game arrives holding you and then drains, in three specific ways: you consume its novelty faster than it produces it, your skill climbs past its challenge curve, and eventually it stops handing you goals — leaving you to generate your own, which is the exact function that's impaired. So Play mode makes you bring a goal and a self-imposed rule, and books the session to end before your measured flat point. Ending mid-thing leaves an open loop that pulls you back; playing it into the ground is what turns a game you loved into one you can't open.
- Challenge runs, no-hit runs and nuzlockes are this technique, invented by players. Zeigarnik again for the stopping rule.
- Give the task a live score
- Games hand you feedback every second; a report hands you feedback in three days, which is why one holds you and the other doesn't. Counting a real unit of the work, with a rate and a pace line, manufactures the loop the task is missing. This is not points for chores — the number counts the work itself and can't be farmed.
- Flow: immediate feedback and a clear proximal goal.
- Turn the dial instead of trying harder
- Absorption sits in a narrow band between too easy and too hard, and falling out of it in either direction feels identical from the inside: you leave. But the fixes are opposites. Bored means raise the difficulty — beat your own rate, no backspace, halve the clock. Overwhelmed means lower it — do the deliberately terrible version, do only the part you already know. Grinding fixes neither.
- Csikszentmihalyi: the challenge/skill channel.
- Measure what your entry actually costs
- Most people quit a few minutes before the state they were trying to reach. So the app asks you to mark the moment it stops feeling like effort, and after three of those it can tell you your real number — and how far short of it you typically stop. That one fact tends to change more than any amount of encouragement.
- Interest, novelty, challenge, urgency
- An ADHD nervous system runs on those four rather than on importance, which is why the deadline works and the plan doesn't. Nothing here appeals to importance. When your recent sessions die, the app tells you to change one thing about the setup, because habituation kills the novelty channel first.
- A steady sound floor
- Brown noise gives the stimulus-seeking part of the system something constant to chew on so the rest can settle, and unlike music with words it doesn't compete for language. Synthesised here, no streaming, works offline.
- Shrink the first move until it's stupid
- Initiation is the whole fight; continuation usually takes care of itself once you're in. So the app refuses to let you plan. It makes you name one physical action under sixty seconds, then starts the clock immediately.
- Behavioural activation; the "just five minutes" rule.
- Make time physical
- The core deficit is time blindness — time doesn't feel like it's passing. Digits don't fix that. A visible quantity draining across the screen does. That's why the bar is the biggest thing on the focus screen.
- Barkley: ADHD as impaired self-regulation across time.
- Catch thoughts without leaving
- Sessions don't die from boredom, they die because something popped into your head and you chased it. An open loop keeps re-firing until it's written down somewhere. So there's a catch field on the focus screen and it never navigates away.
- Zeigarnik effect; externalising working memory.
- Give the worry an appointment
- Rumination isn't solved by arguing with it. Scheduling it to a specific later time — and writing it down so your brain trusts it won't be lost — measurably cuts how much you worry the rest of the day. That's what parking a worry does here.
- Borkovec: stimulus control for worry. Defusion wording is from ACT.
- Two breaths in, one long breath out
- The double-inhale sigh is the fastest voluntary way to bring arousal down in real time. It's forty seconds and it works on the body, not the argument.
- Physiological sigh; cyclic sighing trials.
- When something keeps sliding, wire it to a cue
- "When X happens, I will Y" moves the trigger out of your executive function and into the environment. It's one of the best-evidenced behaviour-change moves there is, and almost no ADHD app uses it. Offered here after a task fails twice.
- Gollwitzer: implementation intentions.
Choose a small place to start.
Choose a first step and a time that works for you. The timer starts when you are ready.
1 — What you would like to get to
2 — A first step, small and physical
3 — Something to count, if it helps
Counting something gives you a bit of feedback while you work, instead of nothing until the end. Pick something small enough to tap every minute or two — or skip this if the work already shows its own progress.
get to
4 — How long you want to try
Optional — make your space easier
You can stop when the time is up. Knowing that is often what makes starting possible.
Today
On the list
Tap the text to start a session on it, or the box when it is done. A few is usually easier to face than a long list.
What's actually happened
Practice, not levels.
Brain-training games don't work. Working-memory games make you better at working-memory games — the transfer to real attention, symptoms or getting anything done collapses once the raters are blinded. Any app selling you a daily n-back to fix your ADHD is selling you the game. What holds up for adults is skills practice and noticing practice, so that's what these are. Four drills, two to four minutes each. No streaks and nothing to keep up.
Which one is it?
Two different failures wearing the same face. One is that you can't stop; the other is that you've stopped and your body hasn't. They need opposite things.
Tonight's landing time
Not a bedtime — the time you start the sequence. This is the only bit that actually goes wrong, so it's the only bit worth setting.
This does not track your sleep and never will — a web page can't see whether you slept, and anything claiming to would be making it up. It tracks the one thing it can see: when you started landing versus when you said you would.
Winding down.
1 — Put down anything still open
Anything unfinished gets rehearsed at 3am, because nothing outside your head is holding it. One line each, then it's not yours until morning.
2 — The sequence
Every step is a place you get derailed, so they're listed instead of remembered. Edit it to match your actual life.
3 — Something to land on
A boring wind-down loses to the phone every time. Give the stimulus-seeking part something quieter to chew, or it will pick for you.
Give your mind something to hold.
"Clear your mind" is the one instruction your brain can't follow. All three of these work the same way — they occupy the part that's generating noise, rather than asking it to stop.
You don't have to sleep. You have to rest. Lying still with your eyes closed recovers a real fraction of what sleep does, and dropping the requirement to fall asleep removes the thing keeping you awake — trying.
ready
If you're still awake in twenty minutes
It often helps to get up — another room, low light, something dull until you feel heavy, then come back. Lying there awake teaches your body that bed is where you lie awake, and that association is most of what keeps insomnia going once it starts. Twenty minutes, then move.
No need to decide. Just pick one.
The void after a task isn't laziness, it's a transition with nothing on the other side — and choosing what goes there is the exact function that's hard. So it's dealt for you: three things, different kinds, all startable this minute. Not much to do is fine. The point is that the next twelve minutes are chosen, not defaulted into.
Interest comes after, not before.
You're waiting to feel like it. For an ADHD brain the feeling isn't a precondition, it's a product — of roughly ten minutes of doing the thing under some stakes. Nobody feels like Elden Ring from the sofa. So: a goal, a rule, a ten-minute toll, and only then a verdict. And when it does hook you, you stop before it goes flat rather than after.
What are you playing
One thing this session is for
Nameable and finishable tonight. "Play some Elden Ring" is not a goal and your brain knows it.
A rule you're imposing on yourself
This is the actual fix. When a game gets easy the challenge drops out of the band and interest dies — so you put the difficulty back by hand. Challenge runs, no-hit runs, nuzlockes: this is how people keep games alive for hundreds of hours.
Stop before it goes flat
The counterintuitive bit: stop while it's still good, mid-thing, with something unfinished. An open loop pulls you back tomorrow. Play until you're bored and the game feels dead the next time you look at it — that's how a game you loved becomes one you can't touch.
Get it out of your head first.
Try putting the thought into words. It does not need to be tidy or complete, and nobody else reads this.
Look at the shape of it.
Same words, one step back. You're not arguing with it — you're noticing it's a sentence rather than a fact.
Is there anything to actually do?
Would a small action help, or would you rather set this aside for later? It is okay if the thought comes back.
What's the one action?
Physical, small, and something you could do today.
When does it get your attention?
Pick a real time. It goes in the parking lot with that time on it, and it will still be there. Your head can let go of something it knows is written down.
Now bring the body down.
Two breaths in through the nose, one long breath out through the mouth. Four rounds, about forty seconds. This is the fastest thing that works, and it works whether or not you believe it.
ready
round 0 of 4
Parked. It'll keep.
Where'd you go?
Name it so it stops pulling. Getting it out costs less than resisting it, and you get to come back with it written down instead of half-remembered.
And where were you, exactly?—
0
chunks00:00
lefttoll
Space bar counts. Anything you note stays on this screen.
Sound floor
screen staying on
How'd that actually go?
Answer honestly — it's the only input the pattern readout has, and a flattering log tells you nothing.
Wire it to a cue instead
When
I will
Saved thoughts
Everything you put down instead of chasing. Nothing here is overdue and nothing here is nagging you — that's what it's for.
Past sessions
There is no streak here and nothing to protect. A three-week gap costs you exactly nothing. This counts what happened, and tells you what your own sessions say about you.