My name is Jon Rumens, and I am the founder of FocusMe.
When I first started working from home back in 2007, I discovered I had a huge problem with procrastination. There was always something more fun or just easier to do than my work! I finally reached crisis point and was way behind on all my projects, so I started looking for software that would help me block distractions. Everything I found was easy for me to bypass, so I decided to procrastinate one last time on my real job.. I invented FocusMe (back then Distraction Blocker). I started to share it with friends and gradually invest all my free time to improving the app.
I use FocusMe on a daily basis, and if I ever forget to use it, my old habits creep back in! This group is very important to me, as a forum to exchange productivity tips as well as to get feedback on my software. My weak-spot is checking my email too often!
I guess this forum is new - good stuff! Looking forward to seeing it flourish.
I actually didn't realize how new FocusMe is in general until a few days after installing it. The app is quite well developed in general and I am thoroughly impressed. One big issue I've had, however, is the interface - besides it looking very much out of date cosmetically (a bit too "round" and not modern enough if you know what I mean), the somewhat clunky dialogues are rather impractical - when you reach a certain number of plans, it becomes impossible to edit plans at the bottom of that list due to screen resolution constraints. I would really like to see a cleaner and more straightforward interface in this regard, as well as adding the ability to drag-and-drop plans.
I also have an issue with the nature of blocklists. Since you must enter them manually, I attempted to copy/paste a list I found online to cover my bases. However, the list was too large, and it crashed the application when I attempted to save the plan. I'm not sure what the long term solution to this would be, but the application will definitely need to be able to handle greater numbers of websites to block.
Also, I think as mentioned by another user on the forum (currently the only other one perhaps besides me?), the porn blocker ends up being far too broad and blocks way too many sites that have no illicit content, simply based on keywords it picks up (mainly from website titles, it seems?). Again, not sure what the solution to this would be, but as of right now the porn blocker is unusable for my purposes, as any site with many innocent words seem to be blocked.
The one suggestion I would love to see implemented is a categorization system similar to that of RescueTime, where entertainment, news, reference, etc. websites are tagged and put into categories of productive/not productive, etc. This really helps when attempting to analyze the way you spend your time.
That's all I can think of for now, hoping to see the app improve by leaps and bounds in the near future! Already a great start.
Edit: Oh, and another crucial suggestion I just remembered: plan groups! Say I have 3 plans that I like to have on during work, and I usually turn them on or off at the same time. It would be super useful for their to be a group where you can turn them all on or off at the same time, so that my "work" plan is actually 3 plans in one that I can control. It would also be useful for scheduling, instead of having to edit each individual plan, for example to only be active during the week and deactivate on the weekend, you can instead have all three follow this rule under one "group" schedule. This would push the app incredibly far ahead, imo.
Edit 2: More of a minor feature, but being able to change when the day ends would be nice. This would help with resetting plans, as if I'm working night shifts it doesn't really help me if my time limits expire an hour into my shift at 12:00 AM.
Good day friends.
I have a paid subscription running on a Windows 10 laptop.
It is currently set to block all porn sites (+5 others) from 00:00 to 23:59 on forced mode.
HOWEVER, many non porn sites are being blocked. Google is the biggest problem but even my local council website results in Chrome closing.
