There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from opening a productivity app and immediately feeling less productive.
You know the ones. The confetti animation when you complete a task. The streak counter that makes you feel guilty for taking a weekend. The dashboard covered in badges, charts, color-coded urgency labels, and a leaderboard nobody asked for. They're designed to be motivating. They're designed by people who find that stuff motivating.
I am not those people. And if you clicked on this post, there's a decent chance you aren't either.
The Problem With "Productivity" Apps
I've spent years watching the productivity app space evolve, and the trajectory is pretty consistent: more features, more gamification, more visual noise. Each new version adds another thing competing for your attention inside the very tool you're using to protect your attention.
For neurotypical users, a lot of this probably lands fine. Streaks feel motivating. Badges feel rewarding. The dopamine hit from a completion animation is a nice little nudge.
For someone with ADHD, that same interface is basically a slot machine. Your brain locks onto the wrong thing. The timer becomes secondary to the achievement system. You spend twenty minutes customizing your workspace theme instead of doing the work.
I kept trying different tools. I kept running into the same wall. And eventually I stopped blaming myself for not finding the right workflow and started looking more carefully at what the tools were actually doing to my brain.
Enter My Daughter
The thing that pushed me from frustration to building was watching my daughter try to use a computer.
She has ADHD. She's sharp, curious, and completely derailed by anything that competes for her attention. Watching her try to use any kind of focused app was like watching someone try to read in a room where every surface had a TV on it.
I wanted to find her something that would help. Something calm. Something that would get out of the way and just... hold the space for focus.
I couldn't find it. So I built it.
"I wanted to make a tool that will help my daughter learn to work with computers and her ADHD. The tool that I never had."
What I Actually Built
PomoTok is a pomodoro focus timer for Windows, and its design philosophy is essentially the inverse of everything I just complained about.
The entire interface is a 320×320 pixel floating widget. Warm, earthy colors. No animations. No streaks. No badges. It sits on top of your work, tells you how much time is left, and stays completely out of the way.
The three things I cared most about getting right:
1. Distraction blocking that actually blocks
Most focus apps offer a browser extension. You can disable it in two clicks. That's not blocking — that's a suggestion. PomoTok routes blocked sites through a local system proxy and forcibly minimizes distracting apps the moment they try to steal focus. You set the rules once. The timer enforces them. No honor system.
2. Screen dimming
A full-screen overlay dims everything outside your active window. This one sounds small. It isn't. Peripheral visual noise is a real problem for a lot of ADHD brains — the thing in the corner of your eye that keeps pulling your gaze. The dim overlay just... stops that from happening. It's remarkably effective.
3. No native Electron
PomoTok is a native WinUI 3 app. Not a web wrapper. Not Electron. It starts in under a second, uses minimal resources, and runs quietly from the system tray between sessions. I'm building tools for people who already have enough competing for their attention — the least I can do is not add a 300MB runtime to that list.
What I Left Out (On Purpose)
No social features. No sharing. No leaderboards. No streaks. No achievements. No sound library. No marketplace. No integrations. No premium tier unlocked by daily check-ins.
Session stats exist — daily and weekly charts of your focus patterns — but they're just data. They don't nudge you. They don't shame you. They're there if you want them.
Every feature I didn't build was a deliberate decision. The productivity app space has a habit of treating "more" as the default direction. PomoTok goes the other way.
The Response So Far
I built this primarily for my daughter and for people like us. What I didn't fully anticipate was how many people would immediately recognize themselves in the problem description.
If you've ever felt like productivity software was designed for someone else's brain — you were probably right. PomoTok was built for yours.
Get PomoTok on the Microsoft Store — $5.99, Windows 10 & 11
👉 https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N9KMN0VNHRN
PomoTok is made by CHKDSK Labs, a one-person indie studio building privacy-respecting, locally-run tools on consumer hardware.
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