A focus timer with a notepad right beside it

Most of my distractions used to come from switching apps. Focusbox is a focus timer with notes built into the same window, so the thing I'm working on and the clock for it never live in two different places.

For years my setup was a timer in one app and notes in another. Every time I needed to jot a thought, I'd leave the timer, land in a notes app, see something else, and lose the thread. The fix turned out to be obvious: put the timer and the notepad side by side and never leave.

The left side is the focus pane. There's a countdown ring with a few presets — 30 minutes, an hour, longer — and you can add time mid-session without resetting. Under it sits a small task list you check off as you go, with a quiet count of what's left. That's the whole timer. No phases to configure, no streaks to keep alive.

The right side is a plain markdown notepad. A light toolbar gives you headings, bold, italic, lists, and checkboxes — enough to keep a session's thinking in order without turning into a document editor. It's one notes page, always there, so you write where you work instead of hunting for the right file.

There's no time-tracking and no scoring anywhere in it. The point is to spend the session doing the work, not reviewing a dashboard about the work. You can try it in your browser right now, or read more about the whole idea on the Focusbox home page.

Why switching apps costs more than it looks

The reason a timer and a notepad belong in one window isn't tidiness. It's that leaving an app is never just leaving an app. You go to write one line, and on the way you pass a badge, a preview, an unread count. Ten seconds later you're reading something. The note you meant to write is still unwritten and the round is effectively over.

The cost isn't the seconds. It's that focus has a warm-up: you spend the first few minutes of any real task loading the thing into your head — the shape of the argument, the state of the code, where you'd got to. Interrupting that doesn't cost you the interruption's length, it costs you the reload. Which is why one careless app switch can flatten twenty minutes.

So the aim isn't discipline, it's removing the reason to leave. If everything a focus round needs — the clock, the list, somewhere to write — is already in front of you, there's no trip to take.

The left pane: the timer

A countdown ring with presets: 30 minutes, an hour, 90 minutes, two hours. Pick one and start. The ring depletes as the time goes, so you get a sense of how much is left from across the desk without reading numbers.

Two details that came out of using it daily. First, you can add time when it ends instead of starting over — the common case when a session runs long isn't "reset", it's "give me fifteen more". Second, on macOS the remaining time sits in the menu bar, so the window can be behind whatever you're actually working in and you can still see the clock.

Under the ring is the task list: type a line, check it off when it's done, and a quiet count tells you what's left. Any task can be promoted to the focus slot under the timer, which is the one thing this round is for. That's the whole timer. No phase configuration, no streaks, nothing to keep alive.

The right pane: the notepad

Plain markdown, with a light toolbar for headings, bold, italic, lists, and checkboxes. Enough to keep a session's thinking in order; deliberately not enough to become a document editor. There's no page tree, no tags, no backlinks, no search index to maintain.

It's one notes page, and that's the part people either love or immediately want to change. The argument for it: the moment there are several pages, writing something down requires deciding where it goes, and that decision is exactly the friction we were trying to delete. One page means the answer is always "here". You cross things off and clear it out when it's stale, like a physical notepad, rather than curating it like a wiki.

If you want a second brain with a schema, this isn't it, and I'd point you at a real notes app. If what you actually do is scribble during work and throw it away afterwards, one page is a relief.

What it doesn't have

No time-tracking. No focus score. No streaks, no weekly report, no notifications, no ambient sound library, no AI. There's no account by default, no analytics, and nothing is transmitted anywhere — your tasks and notes are stored on your own machine.

All of those absences are choices, and they're the reason the app exists: it was built after giving up on a tracker that measured everything. Optional end-to-end-encrypted sync exists if you want the same tasks and notes on a second machine, and it's the only paid part; the app itself is free and works the same without it.

Where it runs

There's a free desktop build for macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows from the same codebase, and a browser version if you'd rather not install anything. If you only want the countdown right now, the Pomodoro timer on this site runs in the page with no download at all.

Download free Open the web app

Questions

Are the notes markdown files I can open elsewhere?

The notepad is markdown-formatted and stored locally with your tasks and settings. It isn't a folder of .md files you point another editor at — it's one document inside the app's own local storage.

Can I have more than one notes page?

No, and that's deliberate. One page removes the "where does this go?" decision, which is the friction that sends you to another app mid-round.

Do the notes sync between my machines?

Only if you turn on the optional paid sync, which is end-to-end encrypted — the server stores encrypted blobs and can't read your notes. Without it, everything stays on the one machine.

Is there a Pomodoro mode?

The desktop timer is a plain countdown with presets rather than an enforced 25/5 cycle. If you want the classic Pomodoro sequence with automatic breaks, use the timer on this site.