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
- Pick a length — 2, 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or tap Custom and slide to anything up to an hour.
- Tap the circle (or the Begin button), put the phone down. After a few quiet seconds a bell rings and the clock starts.
- Sit there. Breathe the way you already know how to breathe.
- Wandered off? Tap My mind wandered. Nothing bad happens — you get a kind word and the timer keeps going.
- A second bell means you’re done. The screen offers a short dedication 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.
- A settle-in
- Begin doesn’t ring the bell at you instantly. There are three silent seconds to put the phone down and close your eyes first — the clock starts with the bell, so they’re free. Tap the circle during them if you’ve changed your mind.
- 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 picks its own spacing to suit the length of the sit — a few minutes apart, wobbling by a fifth either way so you can’t start anticipating them. The line under the options tells you what it’s settled on. Either way the last minutes are left quiet, so nothing rings on top of the closing bell. Sessions under five minutes hide the option — there’s no room for it.
- Hear it before you commit
- Each interval option rings once as you tap it, so you know what you’ve chosen and whether your volume is about to startle you. Off stays silent, as you’d hope.
- 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 careful End
- While the clock is running, End asks for a second tap to confirm — and the clock freezes while it waits, so you’re not charged for the seconds spent deciding. From a paused session, one tap ends it.
- A guided loving-kindness session
- A staged sit rather than a plain one: five stages of wishing people well — someone you love, yourself, a stranger, someone mildly irritating, everyone — with a bell to move you between them so your eyes can stay shut. Ten, fifteen or thirty minutes; the longest is the length the research it points at actually trained. Still no narrator. It lives at /loving-kindness-meditation.
- A guided four-pillar session
- A different staged sit: six short stages — arrive, then awareness, connection, insight and purpose in turn, then rest — each with its own bell, and two of them change instruction partway through with a softer chime. Sit’s own adaptation of a well-being research framework, not a tested programme. It lives at /four-pillars-meditation.
- A guided four-brahmaviharas session
- A third staged sit, through the four Buddhist immeasurables — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity — each widening from someone easy to care for to everyone, with a bell for every change. Ten or fifteen minutes. It lives at /four-brahmaviharas-meditation.
- 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.
- 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.
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 no score at all — no streaks, no totals, no history. Skip a week; the app will not mention it, because it does not know.
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?
Switching tabs or apps is fine — the timer runs off the clock, so the count stays honest and catches up the moment you return. A locked phone is the one gap: a browser can’t ring a bell or send a notification from a dark screen, so keep the screen on (the app holds it awake during a session), or use the Android app, which notifies you when you’re done.
Why can’t I hear the bell?
Check the obvious first: media volume, and on iPhone the ring/silent switch — iOS mutes web audio when the switch is on silent, and there’s nothing an app in the browser can do about it. To test it, tap one of the interval bell options on the home screen: each one rings as you pick it.
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.
The long version: a meditation timer for ADHD brains.
Where does my data go?
Almost nowhere. Your sessions aren't recorded at all, and your preferences are stored on your own device and go no further. The website keeps an anonymous visit count (Vercel's cookieless analytics) — aggregate numbers with no cookies, no profiles and nothing tied to you. The Android app contains no analytics at all.
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.