Little Sisyphus vs NodeDown

Every focus session is a myth in motion. Little Sisyphus turns deep work into a living story. Your phone isn't a quiet object sitting next to you. Locked or not, it's a doorway into everything — every notification, every text, every one of a thousand other rooms it can pull you into. So a blank screen is never really blank. It's a void, calling out to be touched, promising you're one second away from feeling everything at once. A device with that kind of pull can't just be turned off and left alone. The doorway has to be filled with something else, or it will fill itself. Little Sisyphus is that something else. Open it, and a lone figure appears on a sunlit mountainside, pushing a massive stone up an endless slope — drawn in bold, high-contrast color and lit like the last hour before sunset. Let him climb, and you get to disappear into your work instead. It works on you in three ways at once. First, it fills the blank canvas your phone would otherwise be — the same way white noise answers a mind that's about to go looking for something to listen to. Give it the picture, so it stops asking for one. Second, it plays on loss aversion: walk away mid-session, and you don't just lose today — you lose every mile you've pushed since the day you started. Losing that hurts more than finishing ever feels good, and your mind knows it. Third, every climber is placed on a shared ranking, ordered by the hours they have held the stone — quiet, automatic proof that you're not the only one at the base of this mountain. Set against the small hit of one more scroll, one more story, one more reel — that's enough for focus to finally win. It's built on the same premise as the myth itself: the work isn't over when you're tired. It's over when the work is done. Features: A full-screen, continuously animated focus session Fills the moment a locked screen would otherwise leave open Elevation tracked to five decimal places, added to a running lifetime total Leave early, and you forfeit all of it — not just today's climb A shared ranking of every climber, ordered by total hours focused A bold, high-contrast illustration drawn from ancient myth at golden hour Sessions of 25, 45 or 60 minutes The myth says he was condemned to do this forever. You get to choose when to start — and staying with it is the whole point.

NodeDown is a countdown timer built around checkpoints — not just one end time. Set a total duration, then place nodes along the timeline. While the clock runs, NodeDown always shows how long until the next node and until the finish — so you always know where you are and what's coming next. PERFECT FOR • Talks and presentations — "Q&A in 5 minutes", "time to wrap up" • Exams and proctoring — pace every section with clear time marks • Workouts — warm-up, intervals, and cooldown on one continuous clock • Livestreams and events — hit every segment right on time • Cooking, ceremonies, rehearsals, games — anything with milestones KEY FEATURES • One continuous countdown with color-coded node markers on a single timeline • Always-visible time to next node and time to end • Name and color every node • Local notifications when each node is reached — even in the background • Haptic and sound alerts (toggleable) • Pause, resume, and skip forward • Save countdowns as presets and reuse them anytime • Sync your countdowns via iCloud • Dark mode support HOW IT WORKS 1. Set the total duration (e.g. 60 minutes) 2. Add nodes at the key moments (e.g. 20 and 40 minutes) 3. Press Start — NodeDown keeps track of the rest Simple to set up, clear while running — that's NodeDown.