Life interrupts. Your focus does not have to start over.
A private focus companion for iPhone and iPad. Start a session, shield the apps that pull you away, and step away when someone needs you. Your timer holds where it is and picks up on the same second. No leaderboard, no streak to protect, no guilt.
The part nobody counts
0min 0sec
is how long it takes to get back to a task after an interruption, on average.
The interruption is cheap. The re-entry is not.
Eighty two percent of interrupted work does get picked up again the same day. People come back. What they cannot get back is the climb: the reopening, the re-reading, the finding of the thread. Do that three times before lunch and the morning is gone, and it looks from the outside like you never sat down.
Gloria Mark’s research on interrupted work, cited by Jim Kwik in Limitless. Sophie Leroy’s work on attention residue says the same thing from the other side: part of you is still in the last task.
Before the session starts
Pick a Foundation. The loud apps go quiet.
Foundations are the handful of things your day is actually built on. Choose one, set a length, and Focus shields the apps and categories you named, for exactly as long as the session runs. It uses Apple’s own Screen Time framework, so the shield is the operating system’s, not a promise from an app.
The free plan shields three apps or categories at a time, which is enough to run the real loop every day. Pro lifts the cap and lets each Foundation carry its own shield.
Eighteen minutes in, somebody needs you.
Not an emergency. A question that will take four minutes and cannot wait until the hour is up. This is the moment most timers punish you for.
Take the time it takes. Say the thing, help the person, put the pan on. The session is not spending itself in your absence, so there is nothing to hurry back to and nothing to salvage.
Log it in one tap, from your own list.
The things that usually interrupt you are already named in the app, so a Touchpoint takes a second to record. What was a failure becomes information.
Touchpoint ended. You come back to the second you left, not to zero.
Five minutes and twenty seconds of your day went somewhere else. None of your Focus did.
And again, twenty minutes later
Logged, not erased.
“Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits. The damage is never the one interruption. It is deciding that the day is already ruined.
Neither one cost the session a second, so there is nothing here to feel bad about and nothing to make up for.
Every Touchpoint keeps its own time, so at the end of the week you can see what the day actually did to you rather than guessing. Quick Touchpoints are unlimited on the free plan, and so is logging one after the fact, for the interruption you handled before you thought to open the app.
Session ended
Every session ends with a sentence, not a score.
Five days out of seven, and the two blanks are just blanks. Focus keeps a plain history: what you focused on, when you stepped away, what interrupted you most. Patterns show up over weeks, which is the only timescale on which they are true.
Where all of this lives
On your devices. Not on ours.
- No account, unless you want one
- Your Foundations, history and settings sync privately across your own devices through iCloud, automatically. Signing up for anything is optional, and the only thing an optional free email account buys you is sync across a work and a personal Apple ID.
- Nobody else is looking
- There is no feed, no leaderboard, no follower count and no share sheet begging you to post your streak. The app has one audience and it is you.
- iPhone, iPad, and Android
- Show Up Anyways: Focus is live on the App Store and on Google Play. That is the whole platform list today.
- Touchpoints
- 2
- Stepped away
- 8:05
- Focus lost
- 0:00
Do your day. Let it interrupt you.
That was a sample session, drawn by your own scrolling. The real one behaves the same way when the door opens.
Free to start, with the full loop: timer, shielding for three apps or categories, unlimited Touchpoints, history and iCloud sync. Pro lifts the shield cap and gives each Foundation its own, for $4.99/month, $29.99/year (the annual plan starts with 7 days free), or $99.99 once, forever.
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