The Focus Wheel
FW–1FocusWheel — $149.00
FW-1 Focus Wheel on a desk, task list on the display
FW-1 Focus Wheel from overhead, showing the recessed display and bezel ring
FW-1 Focus Wheel held in a hand, showing its scale
FW-1 Focus Wheel laid flat, matte black two-part body
FW–1

FocusWheel

$149.00
ships within 3 days
secure checkout
30–day returns

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

Ships from Brooklyn within three business days. Returns for thirty days, opened or not.

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.

Who it’s for

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.

Freelance & studio

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.

Already list–keepers

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.

App quitters

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.
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.
The evidence

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.

small · .2medium · .5large · .8
Deciding in advanceFollow–through · Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006
0.65
Meta–analysis of 94 independent tests, 8,000+ participants. The largest, best–replicated effect in the field.
A short breakVigour · Albulescu et al. 2022
0.36
Micro–breaks reliably restore energy. This is what a break is for.
A short breakFatigue · Albulescu et al. 2022
0.35
Fatigue drops by about the same amount that vigour rises.
A short breakPerformance · Albulescu et al. 2022
0.16
not significant
The break did not measurably change how much people produced. We are showing you the bar that undercuts us.

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.

What the wheel does The queue is built once, in the app, before the day starts. By the time you sit down the deciding is already done — the device only runs it.

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.

What the wheel does One task per session, and it asks you to close that task before it will move on. Interruptions get written down, not served.

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.).

What the wheel does Offers you five minutes after a session and does not pretend it is making you faster. It is there so the next session starts from a better place.
What we do not claim
  • “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.

The method

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 →