INTERNAL MEMO · DO NOT FORWARD
Get less done today.
Otium Industries is an app that makes you slightly worse at your job. Short games, small deniable dares, and a timer that counts how long you have gone without being useful. Best played on company time.
Your employer cannot buy this. That is a feature.
Time successfully wasted
02:47:13
The hours were never really theirs.
You are paid for output, not for every conscious minute between nine and six. Everyone knows this. The strange part is how much guilt gets attached to the gaps anyway — as if a wandering afternoon were a small theft rather than the ordinary shape of being a person.
Otium Industries is a permission slip with games attached. It will not fix your job. It just refuses to pretend the gaps are a problem.
Terms & conditions
- No manager dashboard
- There is no version of this that your employer can buy, configure, or see the results of. There will not be one.
- Nothing syncs
- Not to your calendar, not to your work account, not to a productivity suite. It does not know where you work and does not want to.
- No wellness framing
- This is not a break timer that returns you refreshed and 12% more effective. That is the same machine with a softer voice.
The catalogue
Product lines, in the loosest possible sense.
Two-minute games
Finishable before anyone walks past. Designed to be closed with one thumb and an innocent expression.
Deniable dares
Say "synergy" completely sincerely in a meeting and count the flinches. Nothing here would survive being described to HR, because nothing here is against any rule.
Meeting bingo
For calls that could have been emails. Shared cards, so the person opposite you knows exactly why you are smiling.
The reverse timer
Counts up for as long as you have successfully avoided being useful. It is the only metric in the app and it is going the wrong way on purpose.
Questions
Is this going to get me fired?
No. Everything in here is the sort of thing you would do anyway on a slow Tuesday — a quick game, a private joke, a moment of not working. It is not sabotage, it does not touch any system you do not own, and none of it is against a rule you agreed to. It is just unapologetic about it.
Is it anti-work?
It is anti the idea that every hour you are alive should produce something. Most people have to work. The argument is only that the hours in between were never really the employer’s to begin with.
Why "Industries"?
"Otium" is Latin for time that is not for anything. Attaching "Industries" to it — an industrial-scale operation for producing nothing — is the joke, and also the point: the only way rest gets taken seriously now is by dressing it up as infrastructure.
When can I have it?
In development. Join the list and you will hear when there is something to open. We are in no rush, which is thematically consistent.
Clock in. Play anyway.
Leave your email. We will tell you when there is something to be caught using.