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

Focus and Productivity Apps abound to help you tune out the many distractions coming 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 work. But you can also turn them off very easily as soon as you feel that you are not scrolling continuously enough.

That’s where Flipper’s Busy Bar comes in, a hardware clock with an LED screen that also serves as a clock and a dedicated timer. Press the big button in the middle, and the screen will display a bright red “busy” sign or some other message that tells people around you that you’re busy. (Probably “Go away” or “Get out of my room, Mom.”) The bar is on sale today and is priced at $249.

“How do you tell people politely, yet firmly, that you don’t want to be bothered?” Says Calum Tennant, Flipper’s creative writer. “We decided the most polite way to do it would be to have a big red light on your desk.”

Courtesy of Flipper Devices

Flipper Devices created Flipper Zero, a $200 portable hacking tool that became 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 number of security concerns. Canada proposed banning the device over fears it could lead to car theft. In 2023, US Customs and Border Protection seized 15,000 Flipper Zero devices, then eventually released them. Flipper is currently working on another model, the Flipper One, which has even more advanced capabilities.

Among those more controversial tools comes the Busy Bar. The bar also works with the separate Busy app, which is one of the productivity and focus tools you have on your phone. What it doesn’t have is the ability to hack anything. “It’s being created by us here at Flipper, but it has no real connection to them,” Tennant says. “They are completely differentiated products.”

Fundamentally, Busy Bar is an expensive “on air” lite. It offers the same productivity capabilities that are probably already built into your phone’s operating system – like blocking notifications on your phone. But Flipper is making the case that — like the Brick, a hardware gadget you tap to block access to certain apps — having a hardware option to turn off distractions around you is meaningfully different from trying to use software productivity tools on your device.