Focus and Journal

Focus#

A Pomodoro timer: work, a short break, and a longer break every few rounds. The defaults are 25, 5 and 15 minutes, with the long break every fourth round. Those are the defaults everywhere, which does not make them right for you, so change them.

The timer's settings

Work duration, Short break, Long break

the three lengths, in minutes.

Long break every

how many work rounds before the long break.

Auto-start Breaks, Auto-start Pomodoros

whether the next block starts on its own or waits for you.

Chime, Desktop notification

how you are told a block has ended.

It keeps running while you work#

Start a session and a small timer sits in the header on every page, so you can go and work in a board and still see how long is left. The time is worked out from the clock rather than counted tick by tick, so a background tab the browser has slowed down is still right when you come back to it. Reload the page, or close the tab and reopen it, and the session you were in picks up where it was.

Attach a card to a session and the time lands against the thing it was spent on. Pick the card on the Focus page before you press start.

What the history says#

The Focus page reads the last 90 days of sessions.

• Days running: consecutive days with at least one finished session.
• Your best hour: the time of day where most of your focused minutes land. It fills in after three sessions.
• Typical session: the median length, so one marathon does not skew it, with your longest beside it.
• Recent sessions: each one with the card it was for, if any.

In a family workspace#

Your sessions are shared with the household unless you turn off Share Focus Status in your family settings. Turned off, they never reach anyone else's device and the assistant keeps them to you. Nobody else can end, edit or delete your sessions. See Family.

Journal#

The Journal opens on today. Use the date bar to move to any other day; days you wrote something are marked on it. Each day has two parts:

1. The day, gathered for you. Focus minutes, habits kept, tasks finished and things captured, then the day's activity in order. Nothing to fill in.
2. Your reflection. A blank page in the same markdown editor as Notes.

Below that, the archive lists every entry you have written, newest first.

If you plan or close the day from Today, those lines land in the same entry, as "Plan for the day:" and "Closing the day:". See Plan the day, close the day.

An entry is a real note, filed in a Journal folder that also appears in your notes list. The difference from an ordinary note is intent. A note is about a subject, and you go back to it. A journal entry is about a day, and mostly you do not. Its value is in having written it, and occasionally in the assistant spotting a pattern across months of them that rereading would never show you.

The assistant menu at the top of the Journal offers prompts such as "Reflect on this week", "Mood & theme patterns" and "What did I commit to?". Each is anchored on the day you are looking at, not on today, so browsing back to March and asking about "this week" means that week in March.