Modes: one profile per kind of hour

Blocking everything is easy to build and impossible to live with, because the same phone holds your lecture, your alarm, your bus ticket and the thing that eats your evening. A mode is the answer to that: the set of things that are a problem *for this kind of hour*, and nothing else.

What one mode holds

The four you start with

Onboarding asks what you are trying to protect and builds modes from the answer, rather than handing you an empty screen. Study is the strictest — social, video and games out, your lecture channels in. Deep Work leaves the tools you work in and takes the rest. Wind Down is for the hour before sleep. Present is the short one: dinner, a conversation, a room you want to actually be in.

None of them is sacred. Rename them, delete them, keep one. The names exist so the first session can start in a minute rather than after twenty minutes of configuration.

How a mode starts

1. Tap it. One tap in the app starts a session in that mode — no key needed, and no connection needed once a Spark has been paired.
2. Or let a schedule start it, at the same hours every weekday, whether or not you remember.
3. Or start it with the key: tap your Spark and the mode you assigned to it begins.

Ending it early is the part that costs something: you fetch the key and hold your phone against it. That asymmetry — free to start, expensive to stop — is the whole design, and it is why the modes can afford to be strict.

The honest limits

• One mode runs at a time. Sessions do not stack.
• On iPhone, a mode blocks whole apps. It cannot block a feed inside an app, because Apple's framework cannot see inside one — that is a platform limit, not a choice.
• Calls always get through, on both platforms. A phone has to stay a phone.
• A mode is a list you wrote. It blocks what you named and nothing else, so the first week usually involves adding the thing you forgot.