Focus and productivity Apps abound, all to help block out the many distractions from your phone. Or annoying people at your open office desk. Digital wellness tools can silence notifications, limit apps like TikTok and Instagram, and help you focus on the task at hand. But you can also easily turn them off as soon as you feel you haven’t scrolled far enough.

This is where the flipper is. Busy bar Comes with a hardware clock with an LED screen that doubles as a clock and a dedicated timer. Tap the big button in the middle, and the screen displays a bright red “BUSY” sign or some other message that lets those around you know you’re pretty busy. (Maybe “go away” or “get out of my room, mom.”) The bar is on sale today and costs $249.

“How do you politely, yet firmly, tell people that you don’t want to be bothered?” says Calum Tennant, a creative writer at Flipper. “We decided the most polite way to do this was with a big red light on your desk.”

Courtesy of Flipper Devices

Flapper devices Flipper Zero, a $200 portable hacking tool that grew up on TikTok in 2022, uses a Tamagotchi-esque dolphin character to detect wireless frequencies and potentially break RFID-controlled locks. It was a device that raised a variety of security concerns. Canada made a proposal. Device ban Fearing that the car might be stolen. In 2023, US Customs and Border Protection 15000 confiscated Flipper Zero devices, then eventually released them. Flipper is currently working on another model. Flapper oneit has even more advanced capabilities.

Between these more controversial instruments comes Busy Bar. Also works with the bar separately. Busy appanother one of those productivity and focus tools that live on your phone. What it doesn’t have is the ability to hack anything. “It’s being built here at Flipper, but there’s no real connection to them,” Tennant says. “They are completely disconnected products.”

Basically, the busy bar is a valuable “on-air” light. It offers many productivity capabilities that are likely already baked into your phone’s operating system—like blocking notifications on your phone. But Flipper is making the case—as such Brick, a hardware gadget You tap to block access to certain apps — having the hardware option to block the distractions around you is meaningfully different from trying to use software productivity tools on your device.