A Useful App for Focusing

I'm needing a bit of extra, er, encouragement to keep off the Fediverse at the moment, and I thought some of you out there might be in the same boat, and I wanted to share the app I use for that: focusedOS

I think there are lots of apps out there that will help either block or put a little speed bump between you and distracting things on your many shiny rectangles, but this is the one I've been using. I love it most because it works across all my devices - if I turn on "Peace of Mind" (which blocks social media apps and sites), it blocks stuff on my computer, and my phone, and my iPad. Turn it on on one device, and it turns it on on all of them. Yay!

It has tons of bells and whistles that I don't personally use, but might be useful to you: you can dim other app windows, you can have it play ambient noise/music, etc. Lots of options for configuring your environment.

On the drawbacks side, it doesn't have any way to schedule turning a focus on or off, but that's easily accomplished with Shortcuts and Automations. You can just make a "Turn on a particular focus" shortcut, and set a time-based automation for it, and likewise with a "Turn off focus" shortcut. Also, when you are setting up a new focus and adding apps/websites to block (or allow), you may need to go in on each device and add the apps from there - Mona on Mac is a "different" app from Mona on iOS, for example. But that's a one-time setup thing, and not too onerous.

And that's it! Just a simple app that pretty reliably does what it says on the tin.