About
WabiTime is made by one person, in Australia, because the timers I could find all started too late.
I don’t have a problem deciding to work. I have a problem with the thirteen minutes after deciding. In those minutes I find the app, I arrange the window, I pick a mode, I look at one other thing while I’m there, and the decision quietly expires. Every focus tool I tried was excellent once I got to it. Getting to it was the whole problem.
So WabiTime is built around one idea: shrink the gap between deciding and doing until it is too small for anything to fall through. On the Mac that means the timer lives in the menu bar; the main window, with projects, tasks and the chart, is there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t. On iPhone it means the session stays on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island, so the intention doesn’t vanish behind another app. Everywhere, it means you type what you’re doing, press once, and the clock is running. Filing it into a project can wait.
The other half is the record. A timer that only counts is a stopwatch. WabiTime keeps every finished session, rolls them into a chart, sets them against a daily goal, and counts the days you hit it. That is the part that makes the next start easier: you have proof that starting works.
The name
Wabi-sabi is the Japanese idea that things are beautiful because they are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Focus is like that. It breaks. You come back. Kintsugi, the craft of repairing a broken bowl with gold, treats the repair as the most valuable part of the object. The app borrows both: broken concentration is not failure, and the record of returning is the thing worth keeping. When you hit a streak milestone, that is the one place the app uses gold.
Who makes it
WabiTime started as a Mac menu-bar timer at the end of 2017. It runs on macOS 15, iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, ships in twelve languages, and almost every feature in it exists because someone wrote in and asked. If you have something to say about it, I read all of it.