The time between tides
Focus is every stretch with no tide in it, minus the few minutes after each tide you spend catching up.
Product / Tide planner
Plan your tides. Watch your focus come back.
Pick a starting point, then drag tides along your day. The planner works out how long you'd get to think between each one, and how long a message might wait for you.
FocusTide: catching upDrag a tide off the track to remove it
Longest focus–
Total focus–
Longest a ping waits–
Interruptions avoided–
The maths
How the planner works it out.
These are the same rules Tempo uses to suggest a schedule when you first set it up. They're deliberately simple.
About 20 seconds a ping
We assume each held ping takes 20 seconds to deal with in a tide. That's at least 5 and never more than 45 minutes.
The longest a ping waits
This is the longest gap between two tides. Doorbells ignore it completely, so urgent things never wait.
Good starting points
Not sure where to begin?
Most people start with three tides and adjust after a week. Here's what early users settled on.
Four tides (10:00, 12:30, 15:00, 17:00) with your direct reports as doorbells. You stay reachable without living in Slack.
Two tides, at lunch and at the end of the day. Add the on-call pager and your lead as doorbells. Expect four-hour mornings.
Tides every 90 minutes, with your clients' domains as doorbells. Internal chatter waits, customers never do.
One tide at lunch and one in the evening. Group chats are the first thing people mute, and the last thing they miss.
Early access · opening in small batches
Take your afternoons back.
We're letting people in a few hundred at a time. Join the list and we'll send one email when it's your turn. Just the one.
- Free plan, no card
- Mac, iPhone and Android
- One email, ever