Primary use on a Windows 10 desktop, secondary use on a Windows 10 laptop, primary browser is Firefox.
Suggestions
Unless I'm missing something, to schedule a plan for all day you have to first click-drag on the bar, *then* manually type in 00:00-24:00. Would be nice to have a single checkbox to immediately enable all-day effect.
Would be nice to be able to re-order my plans in the list via click and drag!
Would be nice to have a changeable time interval for the "periodically force browsers active" option. The current interval can interrupt work.
Would be nice to have a "Do not periodically force browsers active while fullscreen enabled" option — I love the concept of checking for background browser use while idle, but this doesn't seem to gel well with genuinely watching longer videos (or documentaries etc.) as acceptable use.
It's a little frustrating to me that many of the general settings are bound by this "Can't change while a plan is active" rule, which effectively ties the security of that setting to the highest level of security that exists for an active plan. This effectively means that Forced plans cannot ever be made 24/7 without also completely locking the general settings, and seems a bit... too harsh. Should I really have to type in, say, 7,000 random characters to disable all my plans, just to change it so website blocks send me home instead of closing the tab? I understand that it might be clunky to have every setting have individual password protection, but I'd definitely like to be able to change settings if needed without also having to bypass every active plan. Maybe hard from a UI perspective, but can we maybe group options by "impact", or maintain a separate 'settings password', etc?
For users who do like the status quo of the settings changes, perhaps "Can't edit settings while any plans are active" could be an option in and of itself? If this change does get made, I'd super appreciate "off" being default so I don't have to go through the tedious process above :p
Queries
I notice there is a "backup settings daily" option... does this just back up the entirety of the profile, or can it back up and differentiate between specific plans as well? It would be nice to be able to "export" or "import" plans individually or as a bunch, especially for use on multiple computers.
I'm Alex and realised maybe 7 years ago that I was very badly addicted to procrastinating on the internet and had been for a long time prior without realising.
Procrastination in general increasingly became an issue for me as I run my own business and can work whenever I want often with no external deadlines.
Over the last 7 years I've tried many things to help tackle my addiction (which would sometimes swallow up 19 hours of my day) including seeing a psychologist, speaking to friends, setting long complicated passwords for other Time Limit apps, using other internet blocking apps, meditating, writing actionable lists etc etc.
Nothing really worked and I would go through good periods and long bad periods.
I needed something really powerful to completely prevent me from constantly relapsing. I started using ScreenTime on my iPhone and gave my friend the password to adjust the settings for it - this meant I could no longer reinstall distracting apps like Snapchat or Messenger - and could no longer uninstall my 3rd-party website blocking software whenever I wanted to.
But my computer was still a problem. I use it for work so I couldn't just create a parentally controlled account for myself to use and give the admin password to a friend as I need to regularly change settings and install things etc.
I had that same third-party internet blocking software I use on my iPhone on the computer but whenever I wanted to get round it I would simply force uninstall it.
If I couldn't be bothered doing that I would just use one of the never-ending web proxies out there to access whatever blocked website I wanted. I would continuously add countless proxies to my blocklist but new ones would show up everyday.
At some point very recently I saw someone online mentioned FocusMe as being a powerful tool to use for helping with internet addiction. I doubted it would be more powerful than the software I was already using but I had a look at their website and was impressed by the features of the app.
I took out the trial and knew immediately I would be paying for the lifetime membership. The ability to prevent user uninstalling is completely priceless... It means it's actually effective. And the RegEx ability is possibly unique? I no longer have to seek out every proxy website known to mankind to add to my blocklist - because FocusMe sees the blocked website or keywords in the page title regardless if the url has been scrambled. The various different levels of forced mode are useful. The time limit is great, I need to spend more time learning how the break mode thing works, I've been too afraid to use it in Forced Mode in case it means it's constantly active and cannot be edited then. I used a custom 90min Deep Focus/Pomodoro mode for work today and loved it.
Sorry if this sounds like an ad, it really isn't. I have no relationship with anyone involved in this company.
But I'm just super grateful that something like this exists because for others like me it's tough living in a world where you can't just cut out your addiction completely like you can with alcohol or gambling, the internet is a part of many of our careers. Being able to firmly control it is so liberating.
Thanks for having me here. I hope the features become more and more customisable and I hope more people find out about this software.
As you know from my regular emails I love this software and how much more powerful and customisable it is than any other similar products out there.
I love the regular updates and improvements and now that Firefox is working properly it's even more useful for me.
I've got three suggestions with regards to UI that I think would be useful:
1. The ability to create (ideally coloured) custom Categories on the main plan page. I, like many I imagine, have lot's of plans and while you can move them around to put them in order it's still a bit clunky having them all visible at once. It would be nice if various plans could be nested within categories and then with a click a full-size drop down of the included plans is revealed (or hidden again).
2. I'd love if the Plan Settings/Create a Plan window could be dragged and resized. On some of my plans on the Blacklist/Whitelist pages I have many hundreds of lines of websites and RegEx and it's a chore only showing a few lines at once. Also on this same topic I'd love if the little scrolling icon on the Blacklist/Whitelist pages was larger. It's tiny and a pain to click on and drag with when dragging up and down lot's of lines of websites trying to find one you want to adjust or remove.
3. This might be trickier but over on the main Plans page I wish FocusMe allowed you to click and drag plans up and down the list with some kind of animation where the Plans underneath would slide up or down out of the way. Right clicking a plan and 'Move Up' over and over again is a really tedious and old fashioned way of working. Being able to click, drag and drop plans to the position you want them would make things so much simpler and keep the app looking nice and modern too.
Do you think any of these ideas are good or are doable?
I'm Scott, and focusme is the latest method I've added to my arsenal to help me manage life with ADHD. Thanks to the app creator(s) and happy getting-productive to my fellow users!
Right now the two options for website blocking are:
1. Send Home
This has two issues with it that I've experienced so far:
My home page itself might be one of the pages I want blocked after a certain time limit (e.g. Gmail), which can lead to a runaway process
In some browsers you can have multiple tabs as your home 'page', and a block opening all of them might be excessive
2. Close Tab
Issues here include:
Losing the ability to hit 'back' to return to more useful pages (e.g. if you get to a blocked site from an internal link on a useful or allowed one)
A little harder to diagnose exactly what the blocked site was for / what its URL was accordingly, to further improve your plans
If you're opening many new tabs / windows from a single page (e.g. a directory), it's possible to not even notice the closing / notification, which may lead to not knowing you're dealing with incomplete info
I have two proposed additions that might help solve these issues:
Allow redirecting to another page of the users choice — e.g. let me redirect blocked sites to Duolingo, a news feed I use, etc. to encourage me to be more productive
Allow the display of a stock page with information about what was blocked. (You can possibly expand this to also display a motivational message, as some web extensions do)
I have a plan which bans sites based on both URL and title, but has some websites in the whitelist.
When trying to access a whitelisted site (in this case, https://www.chess.com/puzzles), it gets blocked and I have a notification in the top right that it is being blocked by the same plan it is meant to be whitelisted on.
I have "Device Sync" turned on for two devices - a Win10 desktop, and a Win10 laptop, both using Firefox in general. I set up everything on the desktop, then enabled sync on the laptop, and all my plans imported. (Not every setting, it seems, but the plans look fine.)
However - it appears that these plans are just *copies*, rather than true syncs, in terms of timer use. For example, my "Reddit for 20 Mins / Day" timer on my desktop can show a different value to the same timer on my laptop, and using Reddit on my desktop does not appear to count down my laptop timer (and vice versa).
Both devices have "Direction: Both" enabled in the Synchronization setting, though it's greyed out so I don't even really have a choice there.
I really love your app, especially the fact that it is very hard to cheat and disable.
However, I have unfortunately found a way to cheat on my video media limits (YouTube specifically) by playing the media on my monitor and then clicking a non-blocked process on my laptop screen. This allows me to use only a couple of seconds of my limit on opening the video and occasional pausing it, while the video itself can be of various lengths, sometimes longer than my 40min/day allowed time.
I was wondering if there is a way that the app could catch this? I imagine it would be difficult, but perhaps a solution would be to continue counting down the timer if the app catches YouTube playing a video in the background.
I will note that this exploit only works on video-related blocks, things like social media or gaming (which require constant interaction) can't be used this way.
If you want to block windows 10 store apps by process, you will not be able to use the Focusme helper tool to find the name of the process as it will give you ApplicationFrameHost.exe. To find the actual process that the app runs on you can use the command in the command prompt: "tasklist /APPS" after starting the target app. This will display all the processes which are being used to run windows store apps.
A few I have found from this and personally tested include:
windows store: WinStore.App.exe
Xbox app: XboxApp.exe
Films & Tv: Video.UI.exe
Microsoft Edge: MicrosoftEdge.exe
Facebook Messenger: WinUAPEntry.exe
There appear to be a few system processes which are also listed when you use the command so be careful when choosing processes to block when using this method.
Blocking by process for these windows store apps enables them to be blocked by Focusme even when their window is inactive.
I would recommend this method also be shown in the help guides.
