Telos is built on Apple's Screen Time API and the Shortcuts app—the secure, permission-based way a third-party app can gate other apps on iOS. Those blocking features are best described as parental controls, and they arrived alongside the rise of the Time Well Spent movement and the Center for Humane Technology.

Telos is focused entirely on advancing self-regulation: features you set for yourself, pushing the envelope. Apple set the floor. We reach for the ceiling—an all-in-one system that isn't afraid to show you longer time horizons of your own usage.Signature Telos features:

• Hardcore Mode. Apple offers a four-digit key you saved in Notes. We offer a lock you set as tight as you want: you choose a pending wait of 24, 48, or 72 hours per Protocol before any change takes effect, Telos can't be deleted while it's active, and the device clock can't be changed. There is no way out that doesn't cost you a day.
• Three graded overrides. Break—five minutes through a live Shield. Unblock—ends the current block until the next one starts. Emergency Pass—one per week, and that's the whole allowance.
• Deep Work Mode. Duration-based blocking that lifts on its own. • Pause. Eight seconds between the reflex and the feed.
• Sabbatical. Put an app down for a fixed stretch, voluntarily.
• Adaptive Greyscale. On with the block, off when it ends. Duration-based blocking that lifts on its own.
• Pause. Eight seconds between the reflex and the feed.
• Sabbatical. Put an app down for a fixed stretch, voluntarily.
• Adaptive Greyscale. On with the block, off when it ends.

Yes. Every part of Digital Diet is free, unmetered, with no card and no trial: unlimited Protocols, unlimited Pauses, unlimited Sabbaticals, advanced Insights, and premium Hardcore Mode.

Elsewhere in this category you get one schedule, a capped app list, and the strict modes behind a subscription—around $99 a year for it. What others meter, we include in the Telos Freemium Membership—so you can live a healthier, more focused life.

You set Protocols around which apps get Shielded — either through Shallow Time, a weekly budget, or a Schedule, a set of timelines. No daily decisions, no willpower: ambiguity is eliminated through better environment design.

Deep Work Mode, in contrast, is duration-based and on-demand — built for studying and deep work in Cal Newport's sense. In Foresight, start a timer and Telos goes quiet to whatever degree you want. Do Not Disturb, App Shielding, and Greyscale lock in together, for exactly as long as you want to sprint. Done? Everything goes back to normal.

Greyscale is the most effective screen intervention nobody uses. Oversaturation, high contrast, quick-cut 60fps video—it reliably overstimulates a lizard brain that evolved for the savannah and the forest floor, where nothing moved that fast. Strip the colour and your screen suddenly becomes remarkably less attention-demanding.

The problem is that nobody wants to live in perpetual colourlessness, and turning it off permanently in Accessibility settings is too brute a tool for almost anyone.Telos offers Adaptive Greyscale. During Deep Work Mode, greyscale switches on for exactly the stretch you want to be undivided, then colour returns. For longer runs, a Sabbatical holds it for, say, one week—and we notify you when you cross the finish line, to disable it for you.

Telos was conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and designed from the ground up to serve the epicentre of sustained deep focus: Ivy League Plus universities. Here, students put a premium on the ability to learn hard things quickly through intense focus without distraction, which is fertile ground for a closed feedback loop where we can advance Telos in the right environment.

But elite academia, like MIT, is of course not the only place where people shouldn't drink from the firehose. Most of modern information-saturated society suffers from an addictive relationship with the phone they wear like a glove.

Hence Telos opened up through the Freemium Membership: the full Digital Diet, unmetered, for everyone. These are the features we believe are essential to living with the volume and velocity of modern life.

We don't like surveillance capitalism, or services that pretend to be free while selling your personal data to sell you useless stuff you don't need. We're committed to using data only to improve a service that's on your team—nobody else's.

So we don't collect what doesn't serve that purpose. We don't ask to track you across apps. We don't sync what we don't need. And we want nothing to do with the third-party ad platforms that make their money the other way.
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‍We don't track Screen Time data. Selecting and shielding apps runs on opaque tokens, not app names, bundle IDs, or icons. The tokens never leave your phone.
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‍We don't sync calendar data. Events are read on device and never leave it. Because we store none of it, there is no server-side calendar that could ever be compromised.

‍We only collect the personal data we need: account verification, identifying crashes, fixing bugs, and improving the experience. That's the list.

Imagine a to-do list and a calendar had a baby. Foresight elegantly unifies time and task into one grid: see all your events at a glance and plan your Timeblocks around them with one tap. Drag up to set a Telic Timer when you need to lock in, other tasks ripple out of the way, and if you run out of time you can easily save anything for later.

With Top Of Mind you get an overview of everything urgent—deadline prep days, reminders for that day, limbo tasks you still need to complete. Foresight is the one place for exactly that: foresight.

Deadlines always sneak up. You start too late, you don't have enough time, and the stress makes you study less effectively—so you have to study longer than your peers to get to the same place, swallowing the small rejuvenating moments with the people around you. Then you do it again next month. Sound familiar?

Telos helps you skip the daily re-decision tax and keep the big picture in view. Set a deadline and Telos counts backward to plan your Deadline Preps for you. Depending on the stakes, each day gets one automatically, with a clear pressure gauge based on its relative urgency—so you never get blindsided again.

Everything you have to do already exists somewhere. It's just buried in a syllabus, an email thread, a photo of a whiteboard. Reading all of it like a detective just to find four dates is the work before the work.

Snap a photo of a slide, or paste an excerpt from a teacher, and Aura pulls out the deadlines, tasks, and events inside it. What you get are practical, concrete Deadline Preps, Timeblocks, and Cues.

Aura is learning to handle more than coursework. A pre-workout and gym session, a month-long study strategy—anything you can describe, right in your calendar.Copy & Paste is currently in beta with limited availability, with tokens going to our beta members. If you have a token, try it and tell us what you think.

Telos is built in React Native, a cross-platform framework, specifically so Android can follow. The reality is that the vast majority of students on campus carry iPhones, so iOS came first.As a small team, we pick our battles. Every pixel and every line of code has a purpose, and we'd rather do one platform properly than two poorly.