Focus Hero: Achieve your Goals 9+

The only app that’s worked

I’ve tried countless apps meant to motivate you and improve your productivity. This is the only one that has worked from day one. The little hit of dopamine you get for finishing your focus session on category of task you choose definitely has worked like nothing else. Finishing a focus session grants you xp in what ever attribute you choose to level up with your hero as well as grants you 3 random drops of items or gold plus focus energy. Items change your hero’s look and stats, and gold can be spent on buying a nicer home. There has been feedback about more uses for gold and I’m sure that will be implemented at some point.

Between sessions you can enter adventure mode, where what you can do is limited by your focus energy. Save a character, unlock an artifact, grow some plants, open up new sections of the world, fight in trials, all of these require focus energy. This ends up motivating you to do more focus sessions. The trials are what really make me want to level up my character. The first trial is very difficult, and to even attempt it you’ll need to train your hero.

The classic game loop of “play”, meaning doing more and longer focus sessions, and earn rewards that you can spend and use to strengthen and customize your character, is an addicting one. It’s why basically every game you can play nowadays rewards players for playing the game. It becomes addicting, but this time you’re going to be addicted to focusing on the task at at hand.

Great as is, and brimming with potential

I’ve been using this a few days and I really love it. It’s a great idea and well-executed. Totally worth using in its current state, but with some further refinement could be even better. I see the developer is still actively working on it! That’s great.

I’d like to see less strict adherence to the pomodoro style optionally. I track things like workouts in other apps so if I could add them here manually that would be amazing. Its not great to have to start a timer here, open another app, start tracking there, and make sure the pomodoro timer resolves correctly and I’ve pre-estimated the time correctly. I find myself trying to work around the pomodoro aspect of the app at times. It would also be nice to suffer a penalty for ending early as opposed to no credit (optionally) and be able to get some credit for being focused longer than the original timer (again I find myself trying to work around the timer when I focus longer than expected, sometimes having gone 30m over, I then just start a new timer for 30m to get the credit, but I’m actually not even doing that task anymore (because I didn’t set the new timer as soon as the old timer finished).

So in a nutshell, maybe a set of tweaks that allow you to break out of pomodoro mode if desired? I do think having strict pomodoro as the default behavior is good though, I totally get it.

Developer Response ,

Hey Esteban, thanks so much and glad you're finding it useful! There are a lot of potential options ahead for adding more productivity / tracking features, but it's a tricky balance between adding more while still keeping the app simple and intuitive to use. One feature in development is a 'stopwatch' style counter which doesn't require pre-setting a timer, but instead counts up and provides increasing rates of XP the longer that you focus. Always looking for new suggestions though, so any other ideas feel free to let me know at [email protected]

Has great potential!

As someone who does not like to do chores or stay focused without a reward system in place this app does it. Is it the best, I don’t think it has reached that level yet. Which is a good thing and here is why. This app is pretty advanced to where it is now which means in the future it is only going to get better. The developers appreciate feedback and they are working to get it done. They have obviously put in a lot of work to get to where they are and it is on the rise. I have paid for this and I am very pleased with the amount of productivity that I have gotten out of it. I like gaming, but I also like to get things done and this is a great app to accomplish those task.

Developer Response ,

Hey Pika, thanks so much, it's taken me such a long time to get it to this state so I'm glad you're already finding it useful :) Any specific features you'd like to see prioritised for implementation feel free to let me know directly at [email protected]