SAN FRANCISCO — A productivity application that bills itself as "the last organizational tool you will ever need" has distinguished itself in a crowded market by requiring users to actively maintain a relationship with it for approximately two hours per day, developers confirmed Tuesday.

Simplr, which launched in March with the tagline Feel Less. Do More. Be Simplr., sends users seventeen push notifications between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Each notification asks a minor variation of the same question: whether the user has, since the previous notification, achieved a simpler life.

Sample prompts include "Quick check-in: feeling uncluttered? 🌿," "Has your mental load lightened in the last 83 minutes?," and the 9:45 p.m. notification, described in the app's internal documentation as the "Reflection Closer," which reads: "Today is almost over. Did you simplify? (Tap to log your simplicity score.)"

Users who ignore a notification receive a follow-up notification asking why they ignored the first notification, and are encouraged to journal about it.

"We think of each notification as a gentle hand on the shoulder," said Darvish Plume, Simplr's Head of Frictionless User Journeys. "If you're receiving seventeen gentle hands on the shoulder per day and your shoulder is sore, that's data. That's growth."

The app has attracted considerable attention from researchers studying what the industry now calls "remediation overhead" — the time users spend managing tools designed to save them time.

"Simplr is a genuinely impressive case study," said Dr. Cornelia Fitch, Associate Professor of Digital Burden Transference at the Halloway Institute for Behavioral Productivity in Portland. "The average user spends twenty-six minutes per day responding to, dismissing, logging, or feeling guilty about Simplr notifications. That is longer than most of them spent feeling disorganized before they downloaded it."

Simplr's premium tier, Simplr Pro, adds a weekly forty-five-minute guided audio review session in which a soothing voice asks users to reflect on which of that week's 119 notifications they found most clarifying, and to set intentions for next week's 119 notifications.

The app currently holds a 4.6-star rating on the App Store. The most common five-star review reads: "Finally, an app that holds you accountable." The most common one-star review reads: "I downloaded this during a stressful week and I have not had a free evening since."

Plume said the company is aware of the feedback and is developing a companion app, called Simplr Check, which will send users three daily notifications reminding them to review their Simplr notification settings.

"The goal has always been subtraction," he said. "We're just adding a few things first."

Simplr is free to download. A full list of its forty-two configurable notification categories is available in the Settings menu, accessible after completing the app's twenty-minute onboarding flow.