Focus apps are failing neurodivergent minds, please fix

Novel idea: make it so if the user doesnt touch the screen or progress (scroll or something) like within every 30 s, the screen dims and threatens to sleep

Natural, predictable avoidable impediment-consequences > blocking/timers/whatever gimmick.

Learned this from one of my favprite apps of all time that progrsmmed their app such that sometimes it keeps playing even if it goes to sleep from inaction but equally often stops and cuts off play back so yourevincentivized to keep engaging with it in a periodic superstitous way

Very lootbox-esque in some sense. It keeps me the fuck guessing but engaged as fuck

I use a FOSS app on Android called DigiPaws and I love it. My use-case is pretty simple: I want any social media or games to be blocked from opening when I’m trying to go to bed.

I make a ‘autofocus’ rule for any apps in my list: web browsers, games, social media.. Anything I have been tempted to open when I lie down to sleep, and configure a set time period (I use midnight to 7am) and it just closes those apps whenever i try to run them, with a brief toast message like “Focus mode”.

Super simple. No account or service. No judgement or streaks or any of that gamified shit to make you feel bad, just behaviour management.

It works so well for me that I looked into an option for my PC - but I can’t find anything similar.

If anyone knows of an option on PC/Linux, let me know.

Yeah I never go anywhere near those things because 1) i don’t want to become dependent on a specific app to function 2) my phone atm doesn’t support anything, it’s a brick that messages people and has chrome browser and that’s it. 3) if you’re using a focus app, your problem is presumably phone, so you should find a way to cut your relationship with phone itself.

Because they rely on habit forming to capture attention rather than spending the time and money to keep it changing enough to keep it interesting. It’s true of quite a lot of capitalistic practices, like going to an office, and it’s why capitalism doesn’t work well for many of us.

If these apps are like the ones ive already tried years ago, they failed (read : I failed) on step 1.

You get 20 points for brushing your teeth. But either you just say you did it and get the points for free, or your toothbrushing routine just involved remembering opening an app and going through a list and checking a box. Brushing my teeth before bed was proving to be too much work for my lazy lazy brain. Adding work did not help.

Well duh. You can’t gamify what’s needed in an app. It’s neurodivergence, not stupidity.

The floor here seems to be made out of floor

Adding more distractions to the distraction rectangle does not help people with distraction problems, new study finds

Color me shocked. From my experience with apples focuses, the first 3-5y were garbage. Only recently has it gotten better but it’s still not great enough to use reliably. If I feel anxious and turn on the “intelligent breakthrough,” I get every notification but normally blocked ones are shown with a priority banner. No option (that I’ve seen) to give feedback of “no/not important.” Honestly, though, given how little “AI” is in iOS, I’m kinda scared to imagine how Googles Android is with all the force feeding they do with their features

This is because traditionally the brain is used to focus, but now humans are being trained to outsource thinking for convenience sake.

Wow. Shocker. Who knew that focusing on a screen will cause more screen time?

My kids asked me for some app called “Finch” the other day. It’s supposedly a mental health app, and rewards you by letting you raise a virtual pet of some sort. Except it has in-app purchases…it’s just freemium data mining.

It’s all an overcomplication of something that should be super simple. I remember when tasks became gamefied on this website that some of my friends tried out. I got into bullet journalling during that time and I remember some friends downloading a bunch of reminder apps that became more disruptive than helpful. I tried one, that set off an alarm every 20 minutes to remind you to drink water and it fucked up my flow completely.

Disclaimer: I don’t have an official diagnosis, just a lot of ADHD symptoms that are somewhat managable if I simplify my life as much as possible.

All these super duper cool apps and journals and websites and blah blah blah, became a chore to keep up with for myself and everybody else because they demand a level of organization skills that people who struggle with such can’t fucking do!

My biggest problem isn’t so much the ability to focus on tasks, I am relatively good at snapping into workmode if I successfully manipulate myself into believing it’s the most fun shit in the world to do.

Instead, my biggest problem often is that I don’t know how to prioritize anything. Every task that needs to be done has equal importance in my head. I literally cannot tell which one matters more. You can hold up two tasks and go “this one is due tomorrow and this one is due in two days” and my brain will still go: they are equally important.

That’s partially why bullet journalling crashed and burned for me, because I would add in absolutely everyting and fill up my days to the point that I’d have like ten to twenty tasks a day. I even tried to gameify my journal at some points by giving myself points for every task I did and the goal was to reach a 100 points every month. Didn’t work.

I never dabbled in these ADHD focus apps when they became popular, because I literally already went through it with both physical and digital planners and they always went well the first couple of weeks or months when it was new and fun and then at the latest, after three months I would stop doing it after a longer period of deteriation.

The only thing that works for me is that I have ONE goal everyday. ONE. Currently, I have a very specific assignment at work that I can do in increments over a period of time. I do the allotted increments every day - nothing more, nothing less. I avoid the things that tend to distract me too severely when I’m at work (other people. I’m a chatter. I can literally talk with you about anything for hours and never get tired) and I close myself off to the outside world further by listening to podcasts and only allowing myself to browse places like lemmy when I’m taking a lunch break.

It works for me, may not work for other people, though. But the more I can cut myself off from things I know for a fact will snap me out of the zone, the better I am at getting shit done.

Hearing about these apps does the same to my brain as social media. When I was still on facebook and instagram and still followed the news, it all became noise and distractions. It’s so much healthier to go to work and be like “okay, today my goal is to do X.” Doesn’t mean that extra assignments can’t pop in from nowhere and need immediate attention, but in my head, it’s nothing because my goal is still to do X thing before the day is over, and all these other little extra sidequests are quickly done before I can go back to X. Again, it probably doesn’t work like that for everybody and some people don’t have the type of job where they get to only have one thing at the time and some may not even thrive in such an environment. All I can say is that it works for me to eliminate “noise” around me and simplify my life as much as possible.