When I have given myself an allowance of, say, 5 minutes per hour of browsing distracting websites, it would be really good to be able to carry over any unused minutes so they can accumulate over a certain number of hours.
Something that worked similarly to the Pause settings, where you enable it and then choose appropriate numbers, would be good. E.g.
Enable the accumulation of unused allowances for this plan [Enable]
Maximum time to carry over [ 00:00:40 ]
So if I didn’t use all my the 5 minutes in the first hour, the allowance for the next hour would become 10 minutes (5 minutes for that second hour plus 5 carried over). If I didn’t use any in that hour either, then in the third hour I could if I wanted to have 15 minutes. By specifying a maximum time to carry over, I’d be effectively saying that after a certain point it wouldn’t accumulate any more, but I could set the limit high enough that I could potentially accumulate the whole day’s allowances to use later if I wanted to.
This would avoid the situation where you’re working well and don’t want to use your 5 minutes of twitter right now, but you would like to use it later. At the moment, when the clock gets to 55 minutes past the hour, there’s an unfortunate temptation to stop work so as not to ‘waste’ the 5 minutes twitter time for that hour. Being able to carry that five minutes over to the next hour, if it’s not used in the first hour, would remove that temptation, but it would still leave the possibility of short breaks for twitter throughout the day.
Thinking about it, even just a simple tick box for ‘per hour’ time limit plans, specifying that I want unused minutes to accumulate, would be brilliant - I don’t think I really need to set a maximum number of hours over which they can accumulate.
So I might block twitter (or whatever distraction is my nemesis) completely from say 21:00 to 12:00 (the next day), but from 12:00 to 21:00 have a plan running that allows 5 minutes per hour, and tick the box saying ‘Allow minutes to be carried over to the next hour’. My reward for staying focused on work and completely off twitter until, say, 18:00, would then be that I could use it for 30 minutes - the 5 minutes for all the hours from 12:00 to 18:00, saved up and taken together.
I really like the idea of being able to carry over unused browsing time, it would definitely help reduce the pressure to “use it or lose it” every hour. Adding a cap on the accumulated time is a smart way to prevent it from building up too much while still giving flexibility for later breaks.
This is surely a good idea or suggestion! And we’re always open to new features - I’d recommend submitting a feature request here: https://focusme.com/feature-requests/
Our developers regularly look at it and take action depending on what’s most needed by the community. :
For me, this idea is really useful. There are days when I am so busy with work that I don’t have time to sit down, let alone surf the web for fun. Allowing me to transfer unused time to another day will help me feel less ‘disadvantaged’. Limiting the time to accumulate is also very reasonable because if I let it accumulate indefinitely, it will easily lead to overuse on free days.
Thank you for the great idea! We agree that carrying over unused browsing time would help reduce the “use it or lose it” pressure, and capping the accumulated time is a smart way to keep things balanced.
We encourage you to submit your suggestion through our Feature Request page, where you can track its progress and see others’ suggestions. Thanks again for your input!
I would also like to suggest that if this were to be implemented, that you also consider the time you use per launch limit, and that no matter whether you use the launch limit or the time limit, that you can only use these accrued minutes at a certain time of the day.
