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WIREDTactile, clicky buttons. Simple interface. Lots of flexibility to come.TIREDScreen could be brighter. Niche use case. There’s a bunch of apps for that!The Busy Bar is a focus tool that blares a bright red BUSY sign. Stick it on your desk, mount it on your monitor, or put it outside your office—the device works as both a productivity timer and an indication that you are not to be interrupted. It costs $250.
It's made by Flipper Devices, the company known for the Flipper Zero—a handheld hacking tool that uses a Tamagotchi-esque Dolphin to monitor and manipulate certain radio-frequency identification (RFID) frequencies. It freaked some governments out enough that they temporarily banned the product. But the Busy Bar is a much quieter device, meant to sit on your desk or hang on your monitor to let people know you’re in the zone and not to be disturbed. It was announced in 2025, and sales kicked off in June. Flipper recently released the open source firmware on GitHub.
The device is small, roughly the size of a sunglasses case. The default screen reads BUSY, but you can swap between themes that change the message on the screen, like “KEEP OUT,” “OUT TO LUNCH,” or “LOW SOCIAL BATTERY.” The bar also works as a digital clock, and for now that’s the only other app on it.
Photograph: Boone AshworthUsing the bar is straightforward. Physical switches on top let you swap through settings and change timer increments. The big switch at the top is the Start/Pause button, which launches a focus timer or pauses it. The buttons are great, all very tactile and clicky. I find myself wanting to hit pause more often than I should, just to be able to slap that big switch again.
That physicality is the entire selling point of the Busy Bar. Your devices probably already have focus modes baked into them, available on both Apple and Android smartphones. Physical productivity devices offer the idea that software limitations can do only so much to pull you away from your phone. Devices like Brick let you shut off distracting apps on your phone by tapping your phone on the NFC-enabled tag. The Busy Bar incorporates those kinds of blocks as well, letting the bar sync to your device via Bluetooth. It is also Matter-certified and can work with smart home devices to trigger your lights or music—maybe even close the shades so you can zone in.
It works well, though it takes a bit to set up those capabilities. You’ll need a device connected to Matter, like a Google Nest hub or something that supports Home Assistant. Turning off notifications on your phone or desktop requires downloading the app and linking the device. Once you set all this up, the Busy Bar can be triggered via automations in a smart home system. I didn't go the smart-home route, but I did set up an automation that activates the Busy mode when my computer mic is live, letting everyone nearby know I’m on a call.
The company says the idea came from Flipper CEO Pavel Zhovner, who wanted a way to tell people he was, well, busy before they barged into his office. CEOs aiming to let people know when not to bother them seem to be the target audience for the Busy Bar. Depending on your office setup, you might have different results (you can mount it to a wall outside your office, too). But this device doesn’t quite seem to solve the problem the way just slapping on a pair of over-the-ear headphones does.
Photograph: Boone AshworthI used the Busy Bar in WIRED’s open office, and my coworkers mostly just ignored it. One person jokingly asked if I was too busy for him, but then we just talked about other things anyway. When I needed to record audio in our studio, I flipped the Busy Bar to ON AIR mode and faced it outside on the glass. While the screen is bright, the small device isn’t exactly easy to spot from across the vast expanse of an open office. (To be fair, we also have a much larger ON AIR sign on the studio as well, and people still ignore that.) Mostly, I keep the bar on my desk in clock mode.
The Busy Bar is much better for keeping yourself busy. You can change the timer settings, but the Busy Bar’s countdown system defaults to the Pomodoro technique, which divides work into 20-minute segments separated by five-minute breaks. As the timer ticks down, a little Dr. Mario–esque pill around the BUSY icon fills up, adding an extra visual stimulus to indicate that you’re getting through the session. It starts to feel very rewarding to fill up the little pill, then slap the timer on top and hop up for a break. (I’m using it right now as I type, only 1 minute and 42 seconds to go!)
Flipper does say more features are coming to the Busy Bar, like a more expansive app library and the ability to better modify the open source operating system within. That will be the test of how people really use the Busy Bar, watching the settings and features people add to it. (You know someone’s going to play Doom on it.)
For now, the Busy Bar will likely be seen as an overengineered focus tool that only certain people find useful. It’s hard to recommend at $250, especially since it syncs with the Busy app that you can already download and use for free. But if this thing is for you, you’ll probably be enamored with it. Hell, it’s the only thing that got me to focus enough to write this story on time. OK, almost on time.
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