PULSE

Most productivity software is surveillance with a nicer icon. It counts what you did, scores you against it, and the implicit message is that you’re a system that needs correcting.

PULSE is built on the opposite premise. It nudges you to move, defends a block of deep focus, and asks you how it went — and then it gives the answer back to you rather than to a dashboard someone else reads. A mirror, not a tracker.

Designed for, but not limited to

It was built with ADHD and autistic minds in mind, which mostly meant taking some things seriously that general-purpose tools don’t:

• A nudge is not an alarm. Interruption has a cost, and the cost is higher for some people than the tool’s designer usually assumes.
• Self-report beats inference. How the session actually felt is information no sensor can produce. Asking is more accurate and more respectful than guessing.
• Deep focus is worth defending. Getting into it is expensive; being pulled out of it wastes that spend. Protecting the block is the feature.

None of that is exclusive to a diagnosis. It’s just that designing for the case where interruption is costly produces something better for everybody.

Privacy

Your data stays on your machine. There is no account, no sync, and nothing phones home. Released under the AGPL, so anyone can read exactly what it does and any redistributed version has to stay open too.

Status

Built and working as a Windows desktop application. Not formally released — there’s no installer, no versioned download, no announcement. It exists, it runs, and the source is public.