Credit for the image above.

Disclaimer: This post was not sponsored by Focusmate, all of these thoughts are my own.

It's been about two and a half years since my first blog post talking about my experience with Focusmate, and after breaching more than 40x the initial session count I was bragging about, I thought it would be somewhat interesting to revisit my initial assessment of the app:

To get what's obvious out of the way - yes, I like the app, I wouldn't have sunken in almost six months on it continuously otherwise. I had even gotten a scholarship of sorts for the Focusmate Turbo (I think it's called Plus now?) plan, which coincidentally seemed to have expired today. Oh well.

After my initial blog post, I was concerned about my dependence on the app, "would I be able to stay focused on a computer-based task without it?" and in the two years after that: I think I can safely say that my worry was unfounded.

I guess the last "big question" I have from my time spent with Focusmate is the "why?" - why should someone use this app?

The first answer that comes to mind is structure, being able to divide a day into discrete blocks seems useful for keeping things under wraps. But then comes the concept of "flow", a concept that a lot of people on Focusmate (including myself) will bring up after the session time has elapsed, I've noticed that maybe ~40% of the time I mentioned "flow", it then gets completely lost because of the 10 or 15-minute break between 50 or 75-minute sessions.

In the end, there doesn't seem to be any sign of me discontinuing the app. Who knows, maybe I'll make a third retrospective when I reach ten thousand sessions or something.