Focus
Focus sessions, and a policy that decides in advance
The decision to not be interrupted has to be made before the interruption, because afterwards you are no longer the one deciding.
What is Focus Lock?
Crescendo's Focus Lock lets you define, in advance, the windows in which chosen apps should be restricted and what it takes to unlock them — by default 15 minutes per unlock, limited to 3 unlocks per local day. The policy, schedule, unlock grants and history are implemented server-side today; the native client that enforces them on a phone has not shipped.
How the policy works
You choose a mode. Schedule mode restricts only inside the windows you define; always-on mode restricts whenever Focus Lock is enabled. Windows are evaluated against your own timezone, including the awkward cases — a window that crosses midnight, and the days a clock change makes shorter or longer.
An unlock buys a fixed amount of time, 15 minutes by default, and there is a daily limit, 3 by default, counted against your local day. Setting the limit to zero means unlimited, which is a legitimate choice and is stored as one.
Why the server decides and the device only enforces
The server's answer to "should this be restricted right now" never depends on whether a device is healthy. A phone that has lost a permission, run out of battery, or been left at home does not change whether you asked to be unavailable at 9am on a Tuesday.
That separation is structural rather than a convention: the code that decides whether you are blocked takes the device's presence as an input and is not permitted to let it affect the answer. It can only add a reason so the interface can tell you, honestly, that the policy is on and nothing is currently carrying it out. The alternative — letting an unhealthy device relax the policy — fails in the worst possible direction, silently unblocking everything at the exact moment you had no idea protection had stopped.
Why an unlock expires by comparison rather than by a job
An unlock ends when its expiry time passes. Nothing runs to mark it ended, and no scheduled job writes a column when the time comes. A background sweeper that failed would leave someone unlocked indefinitely and silently, which is the one failure a self-discipline tool must not have. A comparison cannot fail to run.
Who this is for
People whose problem is not knowing what to work on but staying with it for ninety minutes. If your difficulty is prioritisation rather than interruption, a focus tool will not help and may make things worse by adding ceremony.
At a glance
- Modes
- Scheduled windows, or always-on
- Default unlock duration
- 15 minutes
- Default daily unlock limit
- 3 per local day (0 = unlimited)
- Policy authority
- Server-side, independent of device health
- Unlock expiry
- By comparison — no sweeper job
- On-device enforcement
- Not shipped
Common questions
- Does Focus Lock actually block apps right now?
- No. The policy engine, schedules, unlock grants, daily limits and history are implemented and working, but enforcement requires a native client on the phone and that does not exist yet. A browser cannot see which app is in the foreground on a phone or stop one opening, and no amount of web technology changes that.
- Why build the policy before the enforcer?
- Because the rules are the hard part and the contract has to be stable before anything is written against it. The sync API a native client will call is frozen and documented, so the enforcer becomes an implementation rather than a redesign.
- What happens if my phone loses the permission it needs?
- The policy is unchanged — you are still restricted as far as the server is concerned — and the interface tells you that nothing is currently enforcing it. A degraded device is never allowed to quietly relax the rules, because that would remove your protection at precisely the moment you were unaware of it.
- Can I unlock from my laptop?
- Yes, and that is deliberate. The phone is the thing being restricted, but the challenge may well be completed on the computer in front of you. Policy lives on the server precisely so that where an unlock is earned and where it is spent do not have to be the same device.
- How long is a focus window?
- Whatever you define. Windows are configured per day of the week with a start and end time, and they may cross midnight — that case is handled explicitly rather than being a bug waiting for someone to work nights.