Updates

Introducing YearRing — An Age Calculator That Actually Answers the Question

Today we're launching YearRing, our third app. It exists because of a small but familiar frustration: searching "age calculator" and landing on a page buried in banner ads, pop-ups, and unrelated widgets, just to find out how old you are in days.

YearRing does one thing. Enter a date, and it tells you the exact age — years, months, and days — along with a few small, satisfying milestones along the way, like when you'll cross 10,000 days or your next round-number birthday. That's the whole app.

We built it with the same rule we used for Slumber and Focus: if a feature doesn't serve the one thing the app is for, it doesn't make the cut. No accounts to create, no data to hand over, no clutter around the answer you came for.

The name comes from tree rings — each one a quiet, exact record of time passed. It felt like the right way to think about counting a life in days rather than just years.

YearRing is free to use. We'd love to hear what you think.

5 Ways to Get More Out of Your Focus Sessions

Focus is intentionally simple — open it, set a timer, work. But a few small habits can make a meaningful difference in how productive your sessions feel. Here are five approaches we've found most effective.

1. Start with the smallest possible task

The hardest part of any work session is beginning. Before you start the timer, write down one small, concrete thing you'll do first — not "work on the report", but "write the opening paragraph". A clear starting point removes the friction of getting going.

2. Match your session length to your energy

Not all work sessions need to be 25 minutes. If you're tired or distracted, a 10-minute sprint is more honest and often more productive than forcing a longer one. Focus lets you set any duration — use it to match how you actually feel.

3. Close everything except what you need

Before starting a session, close browser tabs, silence notifications, and put your phone face down. The timer means nothing if your environment is pulling you away. One minute of setup saves ten minutes of drift.

4. Don't reset after a distraction — just note it

If you get distracted mid-session, resist the urge to restart the timer from zero. Instead, make a small note of what pulled you away and keep going. Over time, these notes reveal patterns — the same apps, the same times of day, the same triggers — that you can then address.

5. End with a one-sentence summary

When the session ends, write one sentence about what you accomplished. This sounds trivial, but it creates a sense of closure that makes the next session easier to start. It also gives you an honest record of where your time actually went.

Understanding Your Baby's Sleep Cycles (And Why They're Different from Yours)

One of the most disorienting things about early parenthood is how unpredictable baby sleep feels. The reason isn't just that babies sleep less — it's that they sleep differently. Understanding that difference can make the exhaustion a little easier to navigate.

Baby sleep cycles are shorter

Adult sleep cycles last around 90 minutes. Newborn sleep cycles are closer to 50–60 minutes, which means babies move between light and deep sleep far more frequently. Every time they transition between cycles, they're more likely to rouse — and without the ability to self-settle, they often wake fully and signal for help.

Newborns spend more time in active sleep

Roughly half of a newborn's sleep is "active sleep" — the equivalent of REM sleep in adults. During active sleep, babies twitch, grimace, and make sounds that can seem like waking. Many parents rush in unnecessarily during this phase. Watching and waiting for 30–60 seconds before responding can help babies learn to settle back on their own.

Sleep consolidates with age

Between 3 and 6 months, most babies begin consolidating their longest stretch of sleep into the night hours. This doesn't happen on a fixed schedule — it varies significantly between babies — but consistent bedtime routines and a predictable sleep environment help the process along.

How Slumber helps

Slumber lets you log each sleep simply and quickly, so you can spot patterns over days and weeks without having to remember everything. Over time, a picture emerges of when your baby sleeps longest, how their schedule is shifting, and what's working. That visibility makes it easier to make small adjustments — and to know when to ask your paediatrician a question.

Introducing Focus — A Work Timer That Stays Out of Your Way

Today we're launching Focus, our second app and the one we built because we kept looking for something that didn't exist: a work session timer that was genuinely simple.

Most productivity tools are built around the idea that you need to be motivated, tracked, and gamified into doing your work. We don't think that's true. We think most people know what they need to do — they just need a clear, quiet space to do it.

Focus gives you that. Set a duration, start the timer, work. When it ends, you stop. No streak to maintain, no points to earn, no dashboard to analyse. Just honest time, honestly spent.

We built it for people who find themselves distracted not by laziness but by the tools that are supposed to help them focus. If you've ever closed a productivity app because it felt like more work than your actual work, Focus is for you.

Focus is free to use. We'd love to hear what you think.

Introducing Slumber — Simple Sleep Tracking for New Parents

We built Slumber because when our team members became parents, the sleep tracking apps available felt overwhelming at exactly the moment when overwhelming was the last thing anyone needed.

Sleep deprivation is one of the defining experiences of early parenthood. In that state, the last thing you want is an app that requires setup, onboarding, or interpretation. You want to tap twice and go back to sleep.

That's Slumber. Log a sleep in seconds. See your baby's pattern over days and weeks. Understand what's normal. Nothing else.

We thought carefully about what to leave out. There are no growth charts, no feeding logs, no diaper trackers — just sleep. We believe an app that does one thing well is more useful than an app that does ten things adequately.

Slumber is free. If you're a new parent and you find it useful, we'd love to hear from you at contactplainpace@gmail.com.

Why We're Building Plainpace

Software has a complexity problem. The apps we rely on most are often the ones that have grown the furthest from their original purpose — buried in features, optimised for engagement, and designed to be hard to leave rather than genuinely useful to be in.

We started Plainpace with a simple question: what would apps look like if they were designed entirely around the moment you're in, rather than the metrics of the company that made them?

The answer, we think, is apps that are smaller. Quieter. Faster to understand. Apps that respect that your attention is finite and your time is valuable — and that the best thing a piece of software can do is give you what you need and then step aside.

That's not a new idea. But it's one that gets lost often in the business of building software. We're trying to hold onto it.

We're a small team. We're building one app at a time, carefully, and only shipping when we'd genuinely use it ourselves. Slumber came first because one of us needed it. Focus came second because all of us did.

More will follow. We hope some of them are exactly what you need.