Attention is yours

It is 6pm. Someone asks what you did today, and you honestly cannot say. You were busy every minute. Fourteen Claude threads, three projects, a wall of model output you skimmed and mostly forgot. Busy is not the same as knowing where the day went.

That blank is a tax nobody itemizes. Feeds were built to pull your attention apart. Now the tools that were supposed to help you think do a quieter version of the same thing: another thread to reload, another thousand tokens to wade through, another context your brain has to hold because the software will not. You switch all day, retain little, and finish tired in a way sleep does not quite fix. And scattered attention does not just cost output. It is what a day feels like from the inside.

I am building Tomato because I live this. Full disclosure: I have ADHD. My attention arrived pre pilfered, and I got tired of watching the rest of it get taken. I wanted the other use of these models: not more output to skim, but a memory that works for me.

Tomato records your day on your Mac, passively, and sorts it into the threads you actually worked on. Close a thread, come back on Thursday, and the thread is still there, with what you did and why. Start a Pomodoro, state your intention, and Tomato checks it against what you are really doing. It taps your shoulder only when you have drifted. It never blocks, and it never scolds.

Then ask it questions. Tomato ships an MCP server, so Claude can look at your recorded day and answer plainly: where did the afternoon go; what did I start this week and never finish. People are already building their own summaries and views on top of it.

All of it stays on your Mac. No account. No Tomato cloud. An app that defends your attention has no business surveilling it. One click pauses recording, or set the hours it watches.

This is not a landing page promise. Tomato is at version 0.6.0, its sixth release, built in public as a four week experiment that kept going. It is free while it is in beta. Download it, record tomorrow, and at 6pm ask your day what happened. See if you like the answer better.

Oliver S., Brooklyn