Day 329: focus mode

woops, second day in a row where i planned to write my weekly plan and then suddenly it’s bed time and i’m quickly dashing off a post before going to sleep

one of the reasons why i ended up staying up late today (it’s surreal that 11pm is late for me now compared to pre-taiwan-quarantine when going to sleep anytime before 3am felt impossible) is because i was testing intention in order to launch the latest new feature: focus mode

i’m amazed by how helpful this feature has been for me in the past few weeks. here’s how it works:

• you decide how long you want to focus for and start the timer
• all distracting sites are blocked during that time (unless you use the productive session feature)
• you can cancel focus mode before your time is up, but the time spent so far doesn’t count toward your stats

that last part has been key, and it’s thanks to the power of sunk cost. once i’m 25 minutes into an hour-long focus session, i’m unwilling to cancel the session because that means i wouldn’t get credit for the 25 minutes. there have been so many instances in the past week where i feel like taking a break form the task at hand, have intention block the site because it’s in focus mode, and i go back to the task i was working on.

in an ideal world, intention would do that even without focus mode, but it doesn’t work because there’s no penalty for going into the distracting site. with focus mode, that changes and i’ve found it to be extremely effective.

we’ll see how i feel about this in a month or 6 months from now, but i think this is a keeper.

sometimes i make things and think “u dun good dk” and this is for sure one of them

so grateful i have the ability to design tools to make my life (and thousands of other people’s lives) better

programming is amazing