# Focus and Journal

> A focus timer that keeps running when you leave the page, and a journal that gathers each day for you and leaves room to write.

## 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.

> **Note: Mistaken starts do not count** A session you end inside its first minute is kept in the history as "ended
> early" and counts toward none of the totals. Pressing Start and then End by
> accident never adds focus that did not happen.

### 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](https://themarginapp.com/docs/family).

> **On the phone:** On an iPhone a running session is a Live Activity, so the countdown shows in
> the Dynamic Island and on the lock screen. The phone can sit face down and
> still be the timer.

> **For agents:** The assistant can start and end a session, tell you whether one is running,
> and summarize your focus time (`start_focus_session`, `end_focus_session`,
> `get_active_session`, `get_focus_summary`).

## 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](https://themarginapp.com/docs/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](https://themarginapp.com/docs/planner-today-and-calendar#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.

> **Tip: Decide about privacy before you start** Entries use the same controls as notes. **Hide from memory** keeps an entry
> out of the assistant's reach, and the Vault seals it behind your code. Both
> work one entry at a time. Given what people put in journals, it is easier to
> settle this on day one than on day ninety. See [Your data](https://themarginapp.com/docs/your-data).

> **On the phone:** The phone's journal opens straight into today's page, with the archive one
> tap away.

**Where to next**

- [Habits](https://themarginapp.com/docs/habits): the check-ins the day's summary reads from
- [Notes](https://themarginapp.com/docs/notes): the editor, folders and privacy controls entries share
- [The Mind](https://themarginapp.com/docs/the-mind): how patterns across entries get noticed


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Section: The rest of life. Checked against the running product on October 5, 2026.
Web page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/focus-and-journal. Every docs page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms.txt