payphone
Focus activeVerified quiet time1h 47m
- Reward earned
- $3.58
- Momentum
- 1.6×
- Session
- Verified
The longer the phone stays quiet, the more the reward builds.
The incentive for phone-free work
Give employees a reason to put the phone down.
Payphone helps employers reward verified phone-free time—creating more focused shifts without monitoring employee activity.
- Verified quiet time
- No app-usage surveillance
- Cash or points rewards
Employee experience preview
More presence on the floor.
Less policing from managers.
A reward employees choose.
The old approach creates a new job
Managers should not have to be the phone police.
Phone bans, repeated reminders, lockers, and punitive policies put managers in constant conflict with employees. They are difficult to enforce consistently and easy to resent.
Payphone changes the equation. Instead of punishing phone use, you offer a reward for verified quiet time. Employees decide whether to participate, while your team gets a clear, privacy-safe program to run.
How Payphone works
Set the incentive.
Let focus earn the reward.
Payphone gives employers a measurable program without turning employee phones into monitoring devices.
- 01
Design your program
Choose cash or points, set the earning rate, and decide whether any work apps should remain available.
- 02
Employees start Focus
Employees opt in on their own iPhones. Apps go quiet locally while their reward builds over time.
- 03
Review verified results
Managers see quiet time, participation, and earned rewards—never app usage, messages, browsing, or screens.
Useful by design. Private by design.
You get the program data.
Not their phone data.
Payphone uses Apple’s Screen Time controls to apply restrictions on the employee’s device. The employer dashboard is intentionally limited to what is needed to run rewards.
What employers can see
- Verified quiet time
- Program participation
- Rewards earned and pending
- Team challenge standings
What stays private
- Apps used or opened
- Messages and browsing
- Screen contents
- Personal activity outside Focus
The evidence behind the problem
Phones do not need to be in someone’s hand to compete for attention.
Independent research supports the attention and motivation mechanisms behind Payphone. We cite the original studies and keep the claims narrow.
Even a silent phone can consume attention
Across two experiments, researchers found that the mere presence of a person’s own smartphone reduced available cognitive capacity—even when participants did not use it.
Ward, Duke, Gneezy & BosJournal of the Association for Consumer Research
Notifications create an attentional cost
A controlled experiment found that receiving phone notifications disrupted performance on a sustained-attention task, even when people did not pick up the phone.
Stothart, Mitchum & YehnertJournal of Experimental Psychology
Fewer interruptions can improve the workday
In a field experiment with 247 participants, disabling communication-app notifications for one workday benefited performance and reduced strain.
Pielot and colleaguesApplied Psychology
Motivation matters when phones compete with work
In an experiment where people could switch between work and their own phones, incoming notifications strongly predicted switching, while the value of the work task also influenced the decision.
Johannes and colleaguesComputers in Human Behavior
These studies support the underlying attention and incentive mechanisms; they are not Payphone outcome studies. We are validating Payphone-specific adoption and ROI through employer pilots and will not present third-party findings as our own results.
Built for real workplaces
Make focus visible without making employees visible.
Use the same program across frontline teams while keeping individual phone activity out of the employer relationship.
Customer-facing teams
Support presence and service without asking managers to confront every phone check.
Safety-sensitive floors
Create a positive reason to keep attention on the environment and the work at hand.
Distributed locations
Run one reward policy with clear quiet-time and payout records across teams.
Ways to start
Start with one team.
Build from real results.
Most employers begin with a guided pilot. Self-serve setup is available for teams that already know how they want to structure the program.
Recommended
Guided pilot
Custom pilot quote
- One team or location
- Reward and policy design
- Manager launch checklist
- Pilot results review
Secondary path
Self-serve workspace
Per employee license
- Create an employer workspace
- Configure cash or points
- Invite employees
- Secure employee-license checkout
Larger organizations
Enterprise
Designed with your team
- Multiple locations and roles
- SSO readiness
- Program governance
- Reporting and payroll workflows
Choose 5–50 employee licenses online. The exact per-license amount, tax, renewal date, and total are shown in secure checkout before payment.
Common questions
What employers usually ask first.
Can we see which apps employees use?
No. Payphone records verified quiet time for the reward program. App usage, messages, browsing, and screen contents stay private.
Can employees pause a Focus session?
No. A session is all-or-nothing. An employee can end Focus whenever they need their phone, but the session stops and the momentum ramp ends rather than pausing in place.
What if employees need a work app?
All apps go quiet by default. If your policy allows specific work apps, the employee is prompted to select the matching apps privately on their device.
Does Payphone support Android?
Payphone currently runs on iPhone using Apple’s Screen Time frameworks. Android support is not yet available.
Who funds the rewards?
The employer defines the program and reward budget. Payphone can track cash bonuses or points and provides a ledger for manager review and payout workflows.
Bring Payphone to your team
See whether a phone-free reward can work at your workplace.
Tell us about your team and the phone-distraction problem you are trying to solve. We will follow up about a focused pilot—not put you into an automated sales sequence.
01
Start small.
One team or location is enough.
Define success first.
Choose the adoption and quiet-time measures that matter.
Protect the privacy line.
No app-level employee monitoring.