You will forget. It won't.

Focus timers and time trackers all assume the hard part is measuring time. It isn't. The hard part is remembering to measure it, in the exact moment you're least able to remember anything, because you're either deep in something or drifting away from it.

So the tracker stays closed, the timer never gets started, two hours disappear, and you genuinely can't say where they went. The tool worked fine. It just needed the one thing you couldn't reliably give it.

ADHD Timer removes that requirement. There is no button you have to remember to press.

Everything below lives in the menu bar menu. You tell it your shift and how much break time you're allowed. After that, the app runs itself. These five are the ones that matter:

The rest is preference: the alarm sound, whether stopping it needs a typed sentence or a whole paragraph, and how often it announces the time out loud (every 15, 30, or 60 minutes).

Your shift is one time window, but it doesn't have to apply to all seven days. Work Days in the menu is a tick per day, starting Monday. Untick the days you're off.

On a day you untick, the whole app goes quiet: no nudges, no automatic breaks, nothing counted towards your score, and a break you start by hand is turned down. The menu bar reads Day off, and the dashboard tells you which day you're back.

• Turns itself on

  Starts with your Mac and runs the whole shift. No session to begin.

• Notices you've gone

  Ten quiet minutes and it starts a break for you, unprompted.

• Ends it when you're back

  One mouse move stops the break. You never clock back in.

• Waits for you to arrive

  Time before you sit down is never counted against you.

• Says the time out loud

  Every half hour, so hours can't vanish silently.

• Refuses to be swatted

  The alarm loops until you type one of 88 sentences, word for word.

• Keeps the score

  Hours, breaks, and desk time recorded daily. Nothing to log.

1. You leaveCoffee, a call, a conversation. You tell it nothing.
2. It starts your breakAfter ten quiet minutes, and notifies you.
3. You come backTouch the mouse. The break ends. Done.

You can start a break yourself when you want one on purpose: 15 or 30 minutes, or cancel one early. That's optional, and it's the only part of the app you ever press.

None of the friction in this app is there to be annoying. Each piece exists because a normal, polite version of it fails in a specific, predictable way.

• Task initiation

  Starting anything is the hardest step

  So there's nothing to start. It launches with your Mac and runs all shift. There is no first step available to fail at.

• Time blindness

  Hours pass without registering

  So it keeps saying them. It announces the time out loud every half hour, and starts counting your absence the moment you stop typing. You don't have to feel time passing for it to be measured.

• Reflexive dismissal

  You silence alerts before you're conscious of them

  So the alarm can't be silenced on autopilot. It loops, and stopping it means typing a full sentence exactly right. It is drawn from 88 of them, or 8 paragraphs if you want it harder, so you can't learn your way around it. That takes just enough attention to actually pull you out of what you drifted into. A single chime gets swatted and forgotten in the same second.

• Hyperfocus and "five more minutes"

  Ignoring it feels free in the moment

  So it isn't free. Overtime keeps counting against your break budget while the alarm rings, including if you walk off and leave it going. The cost is visible and it accumulates.

• Out of sight, out of mind

  An app you have to open is an app you won't

  So it never asks to be opened. It lives in the menu bar with a live number always on screen, next to the clock you already look at.

• Admin fatigue

  Anything you must log manually gets abandoned

  So there's nothing to log. No start button, no stop button, no timesheet. The record writes itself, and it's still accurate on the days you ignore it completely.

• Shame spirals

  A tool that punishes you gets deleted

  So it's built not to punish honesty. Time before you sit down is never counted against you, and using your full break allowance doesn't hurt your score. It measures where you actually were, not how good you were.

Working: the share of your shift spent working, and break minutes left.

On a break, counting down. Solid red for the final minute.

Alarm going, not yet dealt with, now counting up.

Outside your shift. Nothing measured.

A day you unticked in Work Days. Quiet all day.

All three rings share one rule, so you can read them without thinking: the fuller and greener a ring is, the better the news. A ring drains towards amber and then red as it empties.

The window opens as a compact card: just the three rings, sized to sit in a row of desktop widgets. The gear in its top corner unfolds the rest: the break buttons, Cancel, Settings, and a calendar that scores every past day and averages each week, starting Monday. Click a day to see adherence, hours worked, break minutes used, and how many breaks you took. Days you didn't work stay blank and are left out of the week's average, so a four-day week isn't scored as a bad five-day one.

Checked every ten seconds, only during your shift, and only once you've arrived. "Worked" means you were at the machine and not on a break: the keyboard or mouse moved within the last three minutes, so reading something long doesn't count against you.

Break time counts in the bottom half but not the top, which is what makes the number honest: every break you take pulls it down, whether you chose it or drifted into it. An hour of solid work reads 100%; add a 30-minute break and it becomes 67%. Work the rest of the shift and it climbs back.

No account, no server, no internet. Today's totals sit in one small text file, your preferences in another, and one line per finished day is added to a third:

~/Library/Application Support/ADHD Timer/

One small app, works on Intel and Apple Silicon. Unzip it, put it in your Applications folder, and open it.

The first launch gets blocked, because the app isn't signed with a paid Apple developer certificate. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, click Open Anyway. One time only.

Then add it under System Settings → General → Login Items so it starts on its own. That's the entire premise, so don't skip it.