FW-1 Focus Wheel
A timer that holds a queue. Build the day in the app, then leave the phone alone.
details
- Holds 20 tasks and 50 recent sessions
- Runs the session on the device, not the phone
- Works with no account and no internet
- Local web page you can open from any browser on your network
- Local API and an MCP server, so an agent can add tasks
- Three faces: light and dark, six accent colours
in the box
- FW-1 wheel
- 1.5 m braided USB-C cable
- One setup card. No manual.
shipping & returns
Free standard shipping on every order (free over $70; the wheel is $149). Express $15. United States only for now.
You can cancel for a full refund any time before your order leaves us.
Returns for thirty days, opened or not. We pay return postage if the item is faulty, damaged or wrong; a change of mind is your postage.
requirements
USB-C power. iOS 16+ or Android 12+ for the app. 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi for sync — the wheel runs fine without it.
Built for people who bill their own hours.
If your day is one long task, you do not need this. If your day is nine of them across four clients, the cost is not the work — it is deciding what comes next, nine times.
Several clients in a day.
The switching between them is the tax. The queue holds the order you already decided, so you are not re-choosing at every handoff.
It does not want to be your task manager.
You have written today down somewhere already. The wheel reads that list and runs it. Nothing is written back.
You have tried this on your phone.
And it lived on the device you were trying to get away from. This one cannot notify you, cannot be scrolled, and has nothing else on it.
Questions.
Does it need a subscription?
No. The app and the wheel are yours once you buy them. Nothing to renew.
How much is shipping?
Nothing. Standard shipping is free on orders over $70 and the wheel is $149, so every order ships free. Express is $15 if you want it. United States only for now.
Does it work without Wi-Fi?
Yes. Wi-Fi only syncs the queue. Once the list is on the device, sessions run offline.
How is this different from a timer app?
A timer app lives on the device you are trying to get away from. The wheel sits on the desk and never asks you to pick it up.
Can I use it without the app?
Yes. Turn the dial, press, and it is a plain timer. You can also add tasks from the local web page on your own network, or through the local API.
Why is it $149 when a kitchen timer is $12?
Because a kitchen timer counts an interval and then stops. This holds the whole day’s list, in order, and runs it without you touching a phone. If what you want is a countdown, buy the $12 one — we mean that.
Do I have to use twenty-five minutes?
No. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty and sixty are on the dial, and you can twist to any length in between.
Does my task list leave my network?
No. There is no account and no cloud. The app reads your list and sends it to the wheel over your own network, one way, and nothing is written back.
What the research actually supports.
Twenty-five minutes is not a scientifically optimal interval, and we are not going to tell you it is. Three findings do hold up, and each one is a reason the wheel works the way it does.
Cohen’s d, plotted against the conventional small / medium / large thresholds. These measure different outcomes — follow-through is not the same thing as vigour — so read them as four separate findings on a shared scale, not as a ranking of one quantity. Attention residue (Leroy 2009) is not plotted: that paper does not report a single comparable d.
Deciding in advance beats deciding in the moment.
People who fix when and what ahead of time follow through markedly more often than people who simply intend to. It is the strongest, best-replicated result in the field.
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38. Meta-analysis, 94 tests, 8,000+ participants, d = .65.
Switching costs you after you have switched.
Part of your attention stays on the previous task, and it lingers worst when that task was left unfinished. The cost is not the interruption; it is the residue it leaves.
Leroy (2009), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 168–181.
Breaks change how you feel more than what you produce.
Short breaks reliably restore vigour and reduce fatigue. The effect on actual performance was small and did not reach significance — which is worth saying plainly, because most timers imply the opposite.
Albulescu et al. (2022), PLOS ONE. Vigour d = .36, fatigue d = .35, performance d = .16 (n.s.).
- “It takes 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption.” There is no paper. The figure traces to a 2006 interview, and the study usually credited found interrupted tasks were finished faster, though with more stress.
- “A phone on the desk drains your cognitive capacity.” The 2017 “Brain Drain” result failed to replicate in 2022. Tempting for a product like this one. Unusable.
- “Twenty-five minutes is the optimal work interval.” Cirillo picked it with a kitchen timer in the late eighties, working up from a two-minute bet. It was never validated, and he has never claimed it was.
- “Willpower is a resource that runs down.” Ego depletion did not survive replication.
Every one of those is in a competitor’s copy right now. We would rather sell you a timer on what it does.
It started with a tomato timer.
In the late eighties Francesco Cirillo was a student who could not get through his own reading. He did not ask how to work more. He asked whether he could study for two minutes without interrupting himself. He held himself to it with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer — pomodoro is Italian for tomato.
He did not start at twenty-five. He started at two minutes — the smallest interval he could honestly hold — and moved up as he won it. The rule was one task per interval, no switching until it rings, interruptions written down rather than served. Cirillo is blunt about what gets lost in the retellings: the goal was never to finish intervals. It was deciding in advance what comes next.
The wheel is that kitchen timer with the deciding already done — the part every app dropped.
Pomodoro® and Pomodoro Technique® are registered trademarks of Francesco Cirillo. The Focus Company is not affiliated with, associated with, or endorsed by the Pomodoro Technique® or Francesco Cirillo. Cirillo’s own account →