Focus for an hour. Drink the coffee it paid for.
Zenera times how long you leave your phone alone. Lock it and the countdown carries on; open another app and the session is over. Every minute you see through earns a Z Token, and tokens are spent at independent cafés, gyms and bookshops near you.
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Free, with no advertising and nothing to buy inside the app.
Affiliations and institutional support
Three things, and nothing else to learn
The app is deliberately small: a timer, a balance and a list of places to spend it. The timer runs on your phone, so it keeps counting without a signal.
Put your phone down
Pick a length between fifteen minutes and two hours and start. Lock your phone and the countdown carries on; open another app and the session ends.
Earn double for your first hour
Finish the session and every minute counts: two Z Tokens a minute for your first hour each day, one after that. Stop early and your time comes straight back, but nothing is earned.
Spend it down the road
Claim a reward in the app and show the code at the counter. Independent cafés, gyms and bookshops rather than a national chain.
Five days of your first hour is a flat white
The first hour you focus each day earns double, so rewards are priced against days of turning up rather than hours on a clock. The catalogue reads as a list of habits rather than a list of prices. Nothing can be bought with money, and the business pays no commission on a claim.
600 Z
A flat white
five days of your first hour
1,200 Z
£5 off a book
ten days of your first hour
1,800 Z
A bouldering day pass
fifteen days of your first hour
Built for people with something to revise
Zenera started in Cambridge, among students who had the reading but not the hours. The week view shows the time you actually kept, a streak counts the days you finished something, and both sit on the home screen where you cannot avoid them.
Start with twenty-five minutes
One session is enough to tell whether this suits you. If it does, the balance adds up faster than you would expect, and the first thing it buys tends to arrive within a fortnight.
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Free, with no advertising and nothing to subscribe to.