This might be a niche request, but I think adding the ability to close apps even if they are operating in the background (e.g. minimized or obscured behind other apps) would be very helpful in resolving a number of potential cheating methods for FocusMe.
Hello everyone. My name is Greg. I really like the app so far. I like the variety of options and ways to block. The uninstall and forced mode are nice. I have a porn addiction, and also tend to waste time in general watching political videos on youtube. It's easy to waste a lot of time and not do what I should be doing, so I'm hoping to use good technology to fight the bad aspects of technology and improve my life.
So FocusMe's basic function is to lock and then do a countdown, after which it will unlock.
Can you add a feature to set this up the other way round?
Schedule to lock X hours from now, in forced mode (i.e. can't be prevented from locking once the countdown is activated).
I would like to be able to make a plan specific to a device or devices (to use synchronization for parental controls, to allow for different kids needing different blocks, and for me to have my own ones that are also different).
Alternatively, as a temporary workaround I would like to be able to stop synchronization after a plan has been started - that way I could start a block that would affect a child's computer, but pause synchronization after syncing so that I could then have different plans active on my own PC. (It would also be good to be able to pause and restart synchronization without the restart leading to the shared folder having to be chosen again, unless for some reason that folder can't be found any more when synchronization is restarted.)
I've used lots of different kinds of blocking software over the years, for me and for kids, and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. With FocusMe I really like how easy it is to set up and tweak plans, and the different passwords for different actions (stop, pause etc.) are an excellent feature. I think it's got lots of potential for being used by parents, but the plans do need to be different for different client PCs. I really need to be able to stop, start and edit machine-specific plans from my own computer at any time, with changes then picked up by the next routine synchronization from the client PC (one other kind of software I use does this for starting plans, but they then can't be stopped even by the parent, which is frustrating).
I would also like my kids to be able to make their own plans that would not be removed by a sync - so I suppose I'm also asking for the ability to have a set of 'local' plans that aren't synchronized or removed by a sync. That way kids can gradually take responsibility for setting up plans that work for them and help them get work done, without them always having to be imposed by a parent (I have one older teen who is getting towards that point).
For now though I would mainly like machine-specific plans.
1) Let the user set the time when auto enable daily plan is checked. Currently, it is set automatically at 4AM, but the user could choose 10PM, 2AM, 7AM, etc.
2) Be able to take a break during a pomodoro. I understand this kind of goes against the pomodoro concept, but when a client calls and I have to answer, continuing the pomodoro isn't an option. And I hate letting the time run because I have no choice and can't pause it. When pausing the pomodoro, I can continue after the call is over, and therefore I don't lose the pomodoro.
Some UI settings to adjust the size, transparency, etc. of the status notifications would be nice - currently mine feel quite large
It's entirely possible I'm missing something about how the Plan Interval notifications work, but it'd be nice to have an option to show them only when the timer is ticking down; I have one plan that I want to see remaining times for while I'm actively using a blacklisted app, but this seems to also come with notifications just during normal use as well?
Probably my most preferred feature would be better ways of blocking network activity in the background - there are certain cases where I don't want to even let myself have a website open in a tab running in the background. Is there some way to add all network activity from that website to a blacklist, not just the URL / Title? (I understand there is currently an option to Block Websites in Background, but this only seems to work if that website is still the active tab of the browser when the browser itself is inactive.)
Let users add a message to their breaks - e.g. "Get up and stretch!"
Have an option to force breaks at intervals dictated by active computer time somehow, not just the time overall - I probably don't need a break if I've only been sitting back down at my computer again for 3 minutes, but could use one before my next scheduled one after that if it's ages away. Could this be based on mouse/keyboard activity somehow? Idk.
"Grouping" of plans would be nice (like putting them into little colour-coded categories or folders), if only for organisation.
Grouping plans, however, might also make life more convenient for organising security - for instance, I have several plans (Block Social Media, Block Gmail, Block YouTube, Block News, etc.) that I always want to turn off while I'm attending a conference because those sites might be useful. I want it to be irksome to disable any given ONE of them, but not vastly more irksome to disable ALL of them by having to go through and disable each plan individually. I could currently do this by having them all as one plan with therefore just one password etc. required, but that interferes with my ability to give them separate scheduling, and just makes organising the blacklists etc. less tidy. So one great way to do this instead would be to be able to put those plans into a GROUP (say "Communications") that requires 500 characters to disable - which I can do the night before a conference, for instance - but once disabled, I can alter any of those plans, or at the very least they're no running but not editable. (Perhaps this can even override separate plan security, so that if I have 15 plans that I 'ordinarily' want to take 200 characters each to disable, I can still make it possible to disable all of them at once with 'just' 500 characters instead of 3,000)
It would be nice to have an option to rename plans even while they're active (maybe a really serious admin could disable this for meddlesome kids, but I'd hardly abuse it). I have both a small typo that's annoying the hell out of me, and a couple of plans that have expanded in scope through adding things to the blacklist & whitelist, and the title is no longer perfectly reflective.
Likewise, I'd really love some method of making certain GENERAL options more "secure" than others. For instance - sometimes I really like having the "Force Browsers Active When Under Mouse" option on since it makes cheating harder, but it can also annoy me during work. Maybe as my own admin, I don't want this to be so secure that I have to disable every plan (~10k characters of typing) to alter it. Can I maybe lower the security on some settings, but then require all plans disabled to then change security levels?
Related to that - please give us an option to change the time before a "Browser Under Mouse" becomes active! Right now it's a bit clunky in that if I hover my mouse over another window even for 2 seconds (usually by accident / leaving the mouse to one side while I type), it switches windows and interferes with whatever I was typing. If I could make this period longer, it'd still stop me scrolling through an 'inactive' window (at least without it being incredibly annoying), but let me avoid a bunch of those annoyances.
A stacked area chart would be awesome for showing our website / app use over the course of a week, month, etc. Imagine each of those areas as a certain website / app you're using - the chart always adds up to 100% so it shows you how your proportional use of the computer is changing over time, not just use in "total amounts". In general, more ways to display the data over various time periods would be great.
While looking at sites you've spent the most time on, maybe there could be an option to immediately right click > Blacklist Site > Select Plan and quickly add it to an existing plan; a bit more convenient than having to look at the URL then go back to your plans and type it out (since you can't even copy/paste it directly from the statistics tab).
Feedback:
Really, really helpful app - loving it and it's having a great effect on my life, so thank you! I can't wait to see it keep getting better
I believe FocusMe has a default plan to help you block adult content, but I seem to recall it also blocking a bunch of regular sites as well (e.g. news articles that happened to have an adult word in the title, and so on), so I stopped using it. Instead I use K9 Web Filter's pornography block to catch these sites, and it seems to both be more exhaustive in its blacklist and slightly more discriminating in its general "titles" that it catches... but I haven't been able to bypass it so far. It's free to install for at least one computer I think, so might be worth seeing if you can find out how they do it and taking some ideas. Hopefully it's something interesting and not just "they have a more detailed blacklist that they won't share".
