Picture a Tuesday night. A plate of churros sits on the coffee table, something glows on the TV, and your thumb is somewhere else entirely, drifting through a feed. You look up. The churros are gone, and you couldn't tell me where the last hour went.

A new iPhone app wants to make that hour visible. It uses a black circle.

How Oh My Hours counts what you lose

Oh My Hours, as Wired described it, skips the usual dashboard of pie charts and minute counts. Each day is a row of circles, one per hour. If a distracting app grabs you during an hour, that circle goes black. That's the entire display.

You choose what counts as a distraction, by category (social media, games) or app by app. Use one past a set threshold and the hour is marked lost. Out of the box, the threshold is tiny, a matter of seconds. Paying users can stretch it.

I think the stinginess is the smartest choice here. A looser rule would let you treat the first few minutes of every hour as free money.

Reviewer David Nield found a perverse side effect, though. Once an hour went black, his brain decided the damage was done and wanted to cram in as much mindless scrolling as possible before the clock rolled over. Shame, it turns out, has a "might as well" mode.

What it costs, and what you get

The app is free on iOS, with no Android version yet. The paid tier costs $10 a year or $20 for a lifetime license, and it adds longer threshold options plus month and year views. Those views matter most. One day of black circles tells you little. A month of them tells you a lot.

Two features work even if you never pay. The first is quiet hours: pick a stretch of the day when you really don't want to touch your phone, and one slip into a distracting app blackens every hour in that window, not just the current one. Harsh, yes. It's meant to be.

The second is a reset button for an hour marked by mistake, say when a stray tap launches Instagram. There's also an export tool that spits out your stats as a CSV file, handy if you like spreadsheets more than self-reproach.

Three other ways to pry yourself loose

Oh My Hours shows you what happened and leaves the rest to you. If you'd rather have something that gets in your way, Wired's roundup pointed to a few alternatives, all sitting alongside Apple's Screen Time and Google's Digital Wellbeing.

  • One Sec (Android and iOS) makes you finish a breathing exercise before it lets you into an app you've flagged. You can then continue or back out. It's free to start, and about $20 a year buys full blocking and better tracking.
  • Forest (Android and iOS) grows a virtual forest the longer you leave your phone alone, and its developers fund real tree planting too. The basic focus timer is free, while extras start at around $6 a month.
  • ScreenZen (Android and iOS) is free and offers a menu of speed bumps: timed pauses with motivational messages, math problems, and old-fashioned timers and blocks. Donations to the developer are optional.

One Sec, Forest and ScreenZen all act before or during your scroll. Oh My Hours acts after, by handing you the receipt.

Does a black circle change anything?

Nobody knows yet. No one has published data on whether this style of tracking changes habits over months, and the app is too new for long-term results to exist. Nield's own experience, a flash of motivation followed by some rebellious scrolling, suggests the outcome may depend on the person.

Still, the pitch has an appealing bluntness. Minutes feel small. Hours feel like something you could have spent on a walk, a book, or finishing a plate of churros while actually tasting them.

If the paid month and year views are where the app earns its keep, the real test comes at the end of a month, when the grid fills in and your pattern sits there in black. Shrug at that, and no app will save you.

Flinch, and you may have found the right one.