Sit.

A meditation timer that doesn’t take itself too seriously

What this is

Sit is a timer with a circle on it. That is the entire product. You pick a number of minutes, a bell rings, you sit, another bell rings, you get on with your day.

There is no account, no subscription, no streak, no leaderboard and no serene voice inviting you to notice the weight of your body in the chair. It’s free, it works offline, and nothing you do in it leaves your device.

The design goal was quiet. An app that asks for your attention is a strange thing to open when you’re trying to practise not being pulled around by things asking for your attention.

How to use it

  1. Pick a length — 2, 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or tap Custom for anything up to 12 hours.
  2. Tap the circle (or the Begin button). A bell rings.
  3. Sit there. Breathe the way you already know how to breathe.
  4. Wandered off? Tap My mind wandered. Nothing bad happens — you get a kind word and the timer keeps going.
  5. A second bell means you’re done. The screen shows your minutes and tidies itself away — nothing to fill in.

Tapping the circle mid-session pauses it. Tapping again resumes. That’s the whole gesture vocabulary.

If you’ve never done this before

  • You don’t need to sit cross-legged on a cushion. A chair is fine. A sofa is fine. Lying down is fine, though you may fall asleep — which is also fine, just not meditation.
  • You don’t need to empty your mind. Nobody can do that. It is not the goal and never was.
  • You will get distracted. Constantly. So does everyone, including people who have been doing this for forty years. Noticing you drifted and coming back is the exercise — that moment is the entire rep.
  • Two minutes counts. A distracted two minutes counts. A two minutes you spent mentally rewriting an email counts.

What’s in it

Any length you like
Presets at 2, 5, 10 and 20 minutes, plus a custom duration.
An interval bell
A soft bell during the session to nudge you back. Set a fixed gap (2 min, 5 min, or your own), or pick Random, which spaces bells roughly four and a half minutes apart with a wobble so you can’t start anticipating them. Sessions under five minutes hide the option — there’s no room for it.
Preview bell
Hear it before you commit, and check your volume isn’t about to startle you.
The “my mind wandered” button
Tap it whenever you catch yourself somewhere else. You get one of over 130 rotating messages, none of which are disappointed in you. At the end it tells you how many times you came back, because that’s the number actually worth counting.
Pause, +5 min, and a two-tap End
End needs a second tap to confirm, and the clock freezes while it waits — you’re not charged for the seconds spent deciding.
A breathing circle
Something to rest your eyes on, with a ring showing how far through you are. Both go still if your device asks for reduced motion.
Minutes this month
A running total, with last month underneath for contrast. It never resets to zero in anger and it doesn’t care about consecutive days.
Reminders
In the Android app you can set a daily, every-three-days or weekly nudge at a time you pick.
Dark and light
Follows your system until you tap the sun/moon, then it follows you.
Offline, always
Install it from your browser and it works with no connection at all. It makes no network requests once loaded.

Questions

Am I doing it right?

Almost certainly. The bar is “sat down, then remained sitting down.” If you sat for the time and spent most of it thinking about something else, that was a normal, successful meditation session.

Why is there no streak?

Because a streak turns a nice thing into an obligation with a scoreboard, and then missing a Tuesday feels like a moral failure and you delete the app. Sit keeps a monthly total instead. Skip a week; the app will not mention it.

What’s the interval bell actually for?

Long silences are where minds go travelling. A bell every few minutes is a gentle checkpoint — you hear it, you notice you’ve been planning dinner for four minutes, you come back. If you find it intrusive, turn it off. It’s not compulsory.

Can I leave the app mid-session?

Yes. The timer runs off the clock, not off the app being on screen, so backgrounding it, locking the phone or getting a call won’t throw the count off. A notification lets you know when you’re done.

Is this an ADHD app?

Partly. It was built by and for people whose attention has a mind of its own, and the design decisions show it: nothing blinks, nothing badges you, distraction is a button rather than a failure state, and the shortest preset is two minutes because sometimes that’s the honest number.

But it’s a plain, minimal timer, and that turns out to suit most people. You don’t need a diagnosis to use it, and it isn’t a treatment for one. It’s a timer and a bell — not therapy, not medical advice, and no substitute for either.

Where does my data go?

Nowhere. There is no server, no account, no analytics and no third-party anything. Your session minutes and preferences are stored on your own device and go no further. Uninstalling takes them with it.

How do I install it?

On iPhone, open it in Safari and choose Share → Add to Home Screen. On Android, tap the browser menu and choose Install app — or get it from the Play Store. Either way it opens full screen and works offline.

How long should I sit for?

Whatever length you’ll actually do. Ten minutes is a common answer. Two minutes done regularly beats twenty minutes done once in a fit of ambition and then never again.

Why “meditationcult.com”?

It was available. There is no cult. If there were a cult it would have very poor attendance, because everyone would keep forgetting the meetings.