The Busy Bar Is a Gadget to Get People to Leave You Alone

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

This is where Flipper’s Busy Bar comes in, a hardware clock with an LED screen that doubles as a clock and a dedicated timer. Slap the big button in the middle, and the screen displays a bright red “BUSY” sign or another message that lets the people around you know you’re, well, busy. (Maybe try “GO AWAY” or “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, MOM.”) The bar goes on sale today and costs $249.

“How do you let people know politely, yet firmly, that you don't want to be disturbed?” says Callum Tennent, a creative writer at Flipper. “We decided the politest way to do it was a massive red light on your desk.”

Flipper Devices made the Flipper Zero, a $200 portable hacking tool that got big on TikTok in 2022 for using 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 proposed a ban on the device out of fear that it might enable car thefts. In 2023, the US Customs and Border Protection seized 15,000 Flipper Zero devices, then ultimately released them. Flipper is currently working on another model, the Flipper One, that has even more advanced capabilities.

In between those more controversial devices comes the Busy Bar. The bar also works with the separate Busy app, yet another one of those productivity and focus tools living on your phone. What it doesn’t have is the capability of hacking anything. “It's being made by us here at Flipper, but there's no real connection to them,” Tennent says. “They're totally disconnected products.”

Fundamentally, the Busy Bar is a pricey “On Air” light. It offers many of the same 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 that—much like the Brick, a hardware gadget you tap to block access to certain apps—having a hardware option to shut off the distractions around you is meaningfully different than just trying to use software productivity tools on your device.

“It seems absolutely crazy that you have to pick up your phone in order to stop yourself from picking up your phone,” Tennent says. “I'm so brainwashed that I will pick up my phone to do that and immediately get distracted by whatever notification is there.”

The Busy Bar has manual buttons. One switch swaps modes, a dial lets you set stretches of time, and a giant button on top starts or pauses the session. For focus purposes, the bar can set timers that replicate the Pomodoro technique, a productivity practice that relies on timed intervals of work and small breaks.

The Busy Bar is also Matter-certified, which means it can be programmed to work with other smart-home devices. When integrated, it can control smart speakers or trigger lights. If you've got color-changing lightbulbs, for instance, you could hit the switch and turn all the lights in the house red to show everyone that you really need to be left alone. The bar can also be used offline. There’s an app, but it’s not required. If you want it to connect to your phone, you can just connect the bar and your phone with a cable and control it from there.

On a Zoom call or recording a podcast? You can set it so that when your microphone is active, the Busy Bar will automatically indicate that you’re busy, so you don’t even have to press the button at all. You can control it remotely through Wi-Fi, too, so you can mount it on a door or wall instead of having it next to your desk. The big LED screen faces away from you, but there’s a monochrome screen on the back so you can also see how much time is left on the clock.

“I've seen people online calling it over-engineered,” Tennent says. “But I think once they get the device in their hands and understand what you can really do with it, it suddenly becomes clear that it's a lot more than just the display that we initially started with when we were designing it.”

The idea came from Flipper founder Pavel Zhovner, who wanted a better way to indicate when he was occupied in the office. (Zhovner did not speak with WIRED for this story. He was probably busy.) Flipper says the device is open source and can easily be disassembled if parts need replacing. The Busy Bar already has a disassembly guide on the repair website iFixit.

“We were aware that everyone would try to hack us in every possible way,” says Aleksandr Semin, Flipper’s marketing specialist. “That's the reason why we really pay a lot of attention to how secure and how reliable the systems are.”