Bottou
A mirror for your focus
Free
Bottou measures one thing: how long you stay absorbed before your attention breaks.
Tap start when you drop into work. Tap stop the moment you're pulled away.
没頭 (bottou) — the state of being so absorbed you lose track of time.
Bottou measures one thing: how long you stay absorbed before your attention breaks.
Tap start when you drop into work. Tap stop the moment you're pulled away — a notification, a website you didn't need, a mind that wandered off. That block is over. Sit back down and start a new one.
There's no pause button, and that's the point. A pause would let you hide a break inside a block and still call it unbroken. Bottou only ever measures the real thing.
The timer is just the sensor. The real product is the picture that builds over weeks.
WHAT YOU RECORD
• One tap to start. One to stop.
• Why you stopped: done, distracted, interrupted, or ran out of steam.
• How your focus felt, 1 to 5 — anchored to attention, not output. A 90-minute grind that felt scattered is a 2. A sharp 40 minutes where you lost track of time is a 5.
• An optional tag, if you want to know whether you focus better on writing than on admin.
Two taps and you're done. Forgot to stop? Trim the end time back to when you actually stopped — you can only ever make a block shorter, never longer.
WHAT YOU LEARN
• Your average focus block, average break, average focus level, and total focused time — each shown against the period before it. A lone average tells you nothing. The movement is the insight.
• Why you stop, as a breakdown. Watch the share of "distracted" fall over weeks. That's the clearest sign your focus is adapting.
• When you focus best — a heatmap across days and hours of your own local time, so you can stop scheduling deep work for the hours you're useless.
• A calendar of every block, with an optional note on how each day felt.
Your breaks are counted automatically from the gaps between blocks. You never log them, so you can never fudge them.
A MIRROR, NOT A MONITOR
No streaks to guilt you. No trees that die when you look at your phone. No leaderboards, no friends, no scores. Nothing is automatic and nothing is scored against you — the numbers are only as honest as your taps, and they're for you alone.
No ads. Ever.
QUIET BY DESIGN
• Works fully offline. An account is optional.
• Sign in and your blocks sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Blocks under a minute are discarded as misclicks.
• Delete everything, any time, in one tap.
From the Systems Atlas Project — a small portfolio of minimal, evidence-based tools.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Bug fixes and accounts now mandatory to enable data to not be fixed locally and to enable multiple accounts on the same device
The developer, Jude Gordon, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Contact Info
- Usage Data
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Jude Gordon
- Size
- 2.8 MB
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 26.5 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 26.5 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 26.5 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 26.5 or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 26.5 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Systems Atlas Project