How I actually use Focusbox to run a few businesses

I run more than one small business, and the hard part has never been the to-do list. It's protecting the few hours a day where I actually move things forward. Focusbox is the focus app for entrepreneurs I wished existed, so I built it for my own day.

My morning starts by picking one block, not ten. I decide what the next 60 or 90 minutes is for — one business, one outcome — and I set the ring to match. The act of choosing a single block is half the battle. Once the countdown is running, the decision is made and I stop renegotiating with myself.

Then I dump the tasks for that block straight into the list. Not my whole life, just what belongs to this session: draft the investor update, review payroll, call the supplier back. Three to five things, checked off as I go. The small count of what's left is the only progress signal I want while I'm in it.

The notepad beside the timer is where the actual thinking lives. I keep a running note for the session — decisions, numbers, the thing I'll need to remember tomorrow. Because it's right there, I never break focus to find it, and I never lose context jumping between a timer and some other app.

What's deliberately missing is any sense of being graded. There's no score at the end, no weekly report, nothing telling me I was 73% focused. I came to this the hard way — I wrote about it in why I left a tracking app and built a simpler one. The whole tool is built so the session is the point, not the stats about it.

That's it. Pick a block, set the ring, dump the tasks, keep notes beside it, repeat. If that sounds like your kind of day, the rest of the story is on the Focusbox home page.

A real day, in order

Concretely, because “pick a block” is easy to nod along to and hard to picture.

1. Before anything else — set the ring to 90 minutes and name the block. One business, one outcome. If I can't name the outcome in a short sentence, the block isn't ready and I'm about to waste it.
2. Dump three to five tasks into the list. Only what belongs to this block. Everything else is somebody else's problem for the next hour and a half.
3. Promote the first one to the slot under the timer. That's the single thing this round is for; the rest of the list is queue, not focus.
4. Work. Anything that surfaces goes into the notepad as one line and I keep going.
5. When it rings, either add fifteen minutes or stop. If I'm not sure, I stop — the honest answer is usually that I've gone soft and I'm about to start browsing.
6. Clear the note, keep the two lines worth keeping, and go do email like a normal person.

Two blocks like that is a good day. Three is a great one. I stopped trying to build days out of eight of them years ago; it never once worked.

Why 90 minutes and not 25

I know the Pomodoro technique and I don't use it for my own work. Twenty-five minutes is excellent for starting when you don't want to start, and it's the wrong length for the work I actually get paid for. Most of my blocks involve reconstructing something complicated — a set of numbers, a half-made decision, what a supplier said three weeks ago — and the first ten minutes go into loading that up. A bell at twenty-five ends the session right as it becomes useful.

So: 60 to 90 minutes, one break, and I ignore the received wisdom. If you do want the classic 25/5 cycle, the Pomodoro timer on this site does it properly, breaks and all. The technique isn't wrong, it's just not universal, and a timer shouldn't have an opinion about which camp you're in.

The notepad is the part I'd miss

If I had to give up either half of the app, I'd keep the notepad. The timer enforces a decision I could make with a kitchen timer. The notepad is what stops the block from dying.

Running a few businesses at once means the interruptions are mostly internal. I'm doing payroll and I remember a customs form. I'm writing an investor update and I remember I never replied to a supplier. Every one of those is a real thing that will bite me, and the only way to stop it circling is to get it out of my head. One line in the note, right there, and it's handled without leaving.

What goes in during a block: decisions and why, numbers I'll need again, anything a future me will ask about. What goes in as a holding pen: the stray tasks that belong to a different business. At the end I spend two minutes moving the keepers where they belong and delete the rest. It isn't a knowledge base and I don't treat it like one.

Where it broke, and what I changed

The first version of my own routine failed in a boring way: I set the ring, then checked messages “quickly” before starting. The block was gone before it began. The fix wasn't willpower, it was ordering — the ring starts first, and the first task is already promoted before I've looked at anything else.

The second failure was more interesting. I used to keep every business's tasks in the list at once, which meant every block came with a visible reminder of the four things I wasn't doing. Cutting the list down to just this session's items made a bigger difference than any feature I've since added.

The third: I tracked my time for a while, because it seemed responsible. It made me worse. I've written up why I left the tracker and built something quieter — short version, I started managing the number instead of the work.

If you want to copy the setup

Nothing here needs my app specifically; it needs a countdown you can see and somewhere to write that's already open. That said, this is the tool shaped exactly around that routine, it's free, and your data stays on your own machine.

Download free for macOS & Windows Open the web app

Questions

How many focus blocks a day is realistic?

Two is a good day for me, three is a great one. Anyone promising eight is describing a day with no meetings, no children, and no customers.

Do you use it for meetings and admin too?

No. It's for the blocks that move something forward. Admin happens in the gaps between them, deliberately untimed.

How do you keep several businesses separate?

By session, not by structure. Each block belongs to one business, and only that block's tasks go in the list. There are no projects or folders in the app, and I've never wanted them.

Isn't a single notes page too small for that?

It would be if it were an archive. It's a working surface — it gets cleared at the end of a block, and the two lines worth keeping get moved somewhere permanent.