Flipper Busy Bar Review: An Inexpensive Standard Tool

I used the Busy Bar in WIRED’s open office, and most of my colleagues ignored it. Someone jokingly asked me if I was too busy for him, but then we just talked about other things. When I needed to record vocals in our studio, I turned the Busy Bar to ON AIR mode and looked at it in the mirror. Although the screen is bright, the small device is not very easy to see from a large open office area. (To be fair, we also have the biggest ON AIR sign at the studio, and people still ignore that.) Most of the time, I keep the bar on my desk in clock mode.

Busy Bar is perfect for keeping busy. You can change the time settings, but the Busy Bar timer is automatically set to Pomodoro methodwhich divides work into 20-minute segments separated by five-minute breaks. As the timer ticks down, Dr. The Mario–esque near BUSY icon fills in, adding interest to show you’re completing the session. It starts to feel more rewarding to load up on small pills, then shoot the timer at the top and jump off to take a break. (I’m using it right now as I type, only 1 minute and 42 seconds to go!)

Flipper says a lot more is coming to Busy Bar, like a larger app library and the ability to customize the open source engine internally. This will be a test of how people use the Busy Bar, looking at the settings and features that people add to it. (You know someone is going to play Destruction over it.)

At this point, Busy Bar appears to be an attention-grabbing tool that only some people find useful. It’s hard to recommend for $250, especially since it’s compatible with A busy schedule which you can already download and use for free. But if this product is for you, you might be attracted to it. Hell, it’s the only thing that kept me focused enough to write this article on time. Well, almost time.