Telos is essential to get ahead and win at college.
It’s a versatile app that combines not just task and time management, but also a distraction blocking app in one. As far as we know, it’s the first full-fledged calendar and to-do list that not just strengthens signal but also finally offers a quiet place in a noisy world.
Currently, our beta is accessible solely to students at MIT and Harvard. We are building the ultimate tool for students and therefore want to stress-test it (A LOT). So what better place to start our journey than to help those under the highest academic pressure imaginable — if it’s good enough for them, it’ll be good enough for you.
Yes! And if you think about it, it’s even better: Telos is 2x free — free of charge and also free of tracking personal data. Today’s signature features, Flow Blocks and Open Timetables, are not just 100% free — there are no premium versions and they will be free forever. Why?
As you probably discovered for yourself, the “free and open internet” unfortunately is not, in fact, free. Most of the internet has been built on surveillance capitalism — the business of creeping, tracking, surveilling billions of people, every pixel to every page, in order to employ addictive persuasive technology that is not interested in what people want, just what they will watch.
You are what you charge, and every day it is becoming clearer that advertisement companies, like Google and Meta, are not on our team — but someone else’s — and the pernicious negative externalities are becoming more intolerable with each passing day.
We want to do things differently at Telos. We do want to be on your team. We want to transact with you in ways that are re-aligned, and today’s free Telos app is our humble way to start building that relationship with you!
For now, yes. We wanted to start by stress-testing for students under the highest academic pressure imaginable. Once it’s good enough for them, it’ll be good enough for you. From there, we’ll roll out one university at a time. We want to get everything right before we scale.
Think of Flow Blocks as Cal Newport’s deep work time-blocking 2.0.
After taking a more holistic view on what the conditions of academic excellence require, what stands out above all is long stretches of uninterrupted deep work. This follows the research into optimal human experience and elite performance states called “Flow.” Flow is a psychological concept pioneered by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — and hell yeah, we copy-paste this name every time lol.
Following as well the remarkable insights of Gloria Mark (author of Attention Span) and Amishi Jha (author of Peak Mind), it becomes irrefutable that sustained undivided attention is the key to getting ahead and ultimately winning at college. In order for students to stay methodically focused for long stretches, we built Telos on two foundational premises: to counteract goal-dilution with unambiguous time and task clarity, and second, to prevent vigilance decrement (distractibility) through proactively shielding students from interruptions and distractions.
Through a unique user-friendly interface, Telos unifies time and tasks into one grid we call Foresight — separating the fixed from the flux. Classes can overlap, but tasks flow in sequence, uninterupted through Deep Work Mode. If one task extends, the rest ripples. The latter we call Flow Blocks which allows you to chunk tasks through an intuitive atomic-design.
We’re confident it’ll be a one-door experience students soon can’t walk the quad without.
When you activate a Telic Timer, Deep Work Mode automatically kicks in using Apple’s Screen Time SDK and Shortcuts. One drag and we’ll seamlessly activate a 3-layer system: Do Not Disturb, Greyscaling, and App Shielding.
We activate Do Not Disturb so interruptions don’t reach you. With Greyscaling system-wide, we both render your phone less distracting and offer a clear habitual cue to your subconscious that you’re currently off-task while you find yourself on-screen. And lastly, we block apps with Shields, overlaying annoying apps like, say, TikTok and Instagram, so opening them induces as much friction as you personally desire.
It’s completely adaptive — only active while your timer is running. No rigid, crude schedules (think Opal), no manual toggling. Done studying? Everything goes back to normal instantly.
Pull up your entire semester in seconds. We sync directly with MIT’s FireRoad API — the same open course catalog MIT itself maintains — and update it weekly. One tap and your classes are imported with pre-configured times, locations, colors, and icons. Currently MIT, soon Harvard, then beyond. One university at a time.
Screenshot a syllabus, an email, a Canvas page — whatever — on your Mac. Our AI digests it all so you can just pick up your phone and find it turned into well-formatted deadlines, events, and tasks.
Due to the unit economics of AI tokens, we will be gradually rolling out Copy & Paste and offering students a reasonable allowance of image-to-text digestions to keep this feature free in a sustainable manner.
Of course! We’re here to serve all students. We built Telos in React Native — a cross-platform framework — specifically so we can support Android in the foreseeable future. The reality, however, is that the vast majority of students on campus have iPhones, so iOS came first.
At Telos, we make sure every pixel and every line of code has a purpose — to deliver the kind of quality that makes your experience unique and delightful. As a humble startup, we pick our battles wisely.
