Focus
A set number of minutes on one thing, with a clear end. Less a productivity system than a way of making starting possible.
Most of the difficulty in focusing is not the focusing. It is the starting.
An open-ended task — "write the report", "sort out the invoices" — has no visible edge, and a head that is already full cannot picture finishing it. So it gets deferred, hour after hour, while you do not really enjoy anything else either.
A timer changes the shape of the commitment. Twenty minutes is a deal you can take, and the thing you were avoiding usually turns out to be easier once you are inside it.
In the app
A session with nothing to fall into.
Pick a length, optionally pick a sound, and start. There is no feed underneath it and nothing to scroll into — the session runs, and then it tells you it is over.
Pause records that a focus session happened and how long it lasted. That is what later becomes your weekly rhythm. It never knows what you were working on.
How long to make it
Fifteen to twenty-five minutes suits most work and most people. Long enough to get somewhere, short enough that agreeing to it is not a big decision.
Two things matter more than the exact number:
- Decide the one thing before you start the timer. A session spent deciding what to do is a session spent deciding what to do.
- Make that one thing smaller than feels reasonable. Not "write the report" — open the document and write the first heading. Starting is the expensive part; buy it cheaply.
If you finish early, stop. The point is not to fill the block.
The phone in the other room
Discipline has very little to do with this one. A distraction within arm's reach costs you attention whether or not you reach for it, and face-down on the desk is not far enough away to stop costing.
If you are using Pause for the session, the same logic applies to everything else: close the tabs that are not this task, turn notifications off for the length of the block rather than muting them, and put something without words in it in your ears if the room is noisy.
When focus is the wrong thing to fix
Sometimes you cannot focus because you are exhausted, and no arrangement of timers touches that. Sometimes the task is genuinely unclear and the real next step is to ask someone a question. And sometimes something else is occupying you — a conversation, a decision, a worry — which will keep taking priority until you deal with it or write it down.
Thirty seconds spent working out which one it is saves an afternoon. How to focus when your brain feels overloaded goes through each case.
A focus session that ends by itself.
Choose the minutes, start, and get told when it is done. Nothing to browse while it runs.
Get Pause for iPhone