Anchor

Park the distraction. Keep the session.

Every focus timer can count down. Anchor handles the part that actually breaks your work: the interruption. Name what pulled at you in one keystroke, and you're handed straight back to your goal and the time you have left.

Mac · iPhone · Apple Watch Everything stays on your device Coming to the App Store
Anchor on macOS running a 25-minute session for 'Finish the token refresh', showing a cobalt progress ring reading 24:57 remaining and a prominent 'Lock a distraction' button.
One session, one goal, one obvious thing to press when something pulls at you.

Why another timer

Timers assume the hard part is starting. It isn't. The hard part is the Slack message forty minutes in, and what you do in the four seconds after you read it.

  • Parking, not blocking. Type the thought once and it's filed. You get a confirmation that names your goal and your remaining time, so the default action is going back to work rather than "just quickly" handling it.
  • Resuming asks what pulled you away. A pause is usually an interruption you didn't log. Coming back captures it, and saying "nothing, just a break" is one key away.
  • It records the losses too. When a distraction wins, Anchor marks it as such. A tool that only logs your wins produces numbers you can't act on.

Then it tells you the truth

Anchor sorts every interruption by where it came from: the world came to you, or you went to it. That single split is the most useful thing in the data — one is a settings problem, the other is a habit.

Anchor's Insights screen showing 22h 16m focused, 74% completion, 1.8 interruptions per focused hour, a 9-day streak, and a combined chart of hours focused against interruptions per day.
Hours focused as bars, interruptions as a line, on one plot — so you can see the days where the time was there but the attention wasn't.

On your wrist and in your menu bar

Anchor's compact mini timer window showing a small progress ring, 24:55 remaining, and Lock, Pause and End buttons.
The compact version starts, pauses, captures and ends without opening the main window.
Anchor asking 'What pulled you away? You were away 8s' with a text field, a 'Log it' button and a 'Nothing — just a break' option.
Resume asks. Declining is free, which is the only reason asking every time is bearable.

The Apple Watch app is the remote: start, pause, and catch the interruption at the moment it happens without picking anything up.

Private because it has to be

The notes you write in Anchor are a list of everything that distracts you and everyone who interrupts you. That is not data to hand to a server, so Anchor doesn't have one.

  • No account, no analytics, no tracking. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing phoning home.
  • Grouping runs on your device. Apple Intelligence sorts your goals and interruptions locally. Where it isn't available, Anchor falls back to built-in rules and works exactly the same.
  • Sync is your iCloud, not ours. Your devices sync through your own private CloudKit database.

Full detail in the privacy policy.

Export it, or just ask

Your history exports to Excel, CSV and JSON. Anchor also ships a local MCP server, so Claude and other AI clients can read your focus history directly and answer questions like "what broke my focus most this month?" — read-only, on your machine.