The story
About this piece
There's a reason we still understand an hourglass. You don't read it — you feel the time running. We thought your most important hour of the day deserved to be felt, not just counted.
A day full of meetings and no work hours is a day where nothing got done. The calendar is solid colour from nine to six, you were "in" all of it, and the real work — the thing you're actually paid to think hard about — gets pushed to evenings and weekends. Meetings are defended by an invite. Deep work is defended by nothing, so it's the first thing anyone interrupts.
SoboFocus gives focus the same protection a meeting gets — through the most natural gesture there is. You flip the glass.
That single turn starts the sprint and does the defending for you. A focus block drops onto your calendar as genuinely busy time. Slack and Teams switch to Do Not Disturb and post when you'll be back. Your phone and desktop go quiet. And a calm amber ring glows at the base — doing, on an open-plan floor, what a closed door does in an office: telling people you're not available, without you having to say it.
The hourglass is the soul of it. The warm-gold sand falling in front of you turns an abstract "fifty minutes of focus" into something physical and alive — a glance tells you how much sprint is left, no numbers, no screen. The smart base is the muscle: it senses the flip, keeps precise time, handles your breaks, and runs every integration in the background. Choose the 25-minute glass for a quick sprint or the 50-minute for a deep one. When the sand runs out, the ring softens and you're free again — and the app keeps the only score that matters: hours of defended deep work, not hours of meetings.
It can't bolt the door. Someone can still walk over. But focus time stops being the invisible, fair-game gap in your day and becomes a block people can see and respect — including you.
Underneath, it's a Pomodoro timer. On your desk, it's the thing that finally makes your work hours as real as your meetings.
Turn the glass. Defend the hour.
