Focus@Will: Control Your ADD

I’ve been using this for years. Or at least, I did use it for years. The problem is that the “thousands of hours” of music that F@W boasts actually consists of multiple numbered remixes of the same few tracks. The whole point (or part of it, anyway) of using this type of music to focus if you have ADHD is that the music should be unfamiliar. At this point it’s been probably two years since I opened this app, but I can still “hear” a bunch of those tracks in my head. They become instantly recognizable so that you know them note for note. It has a feature that lets you tell it not to play certain tracks (specifically to avoid the “familiarity” thing), but when that track is just one of many indistinguishable iterations of the same thing, that feature is useless. It’s a shame, because while this worked for me, it *really* worked. But that was… 2018? 2019? and (although they did put out a limited amount of additional music a couple of years back) they’re still using basically the exact same tracks. Not to mention that the app hasn’t seen an update in a year. So - F@W is great for a short period or for *extremely* infrequent use, but that lifetime subscription didn’t pan out quite how I hoped it would.

I really do like the app and do believe that the music helps me focus on tasks. However, like the most recent review, I felt completely swindled after realizing that I missed the chance (Forgetting things with ADHD is EXTREMELY common) to cancel my subscription and wound up paying for a subscription. You can imagine my shock when that was a $53/year subscription instead of a $3/week subscription like most other apps. Also what am I paying the $53 for?? The app has a lot to offer but it has much more to improve on before it starts changing people $53 a year in a pandemic where people have lost their jobs. Also it says in the description they’re offering half off subscriptions?? Does that mean this is actually a subscription that costs over $100? Or that I got charged the normal price when I should have been charged around $20? Either way that’s too much to pay for this app. I think you would have much more success if you made the app more affordable or offer a longer trial than 7 days. Like I said, the app itself is good but not for the price and the fact that they have probably made thousands of dollars prying on people like me with ADHD who will inevitably forget to cancel their subscription on time. Not cool!! I’ll continue to use the app until my subscription ends but I refuse to give the app 5 stars when it can be tricky to navigate, gets touchy, and costs more than most of the productivity apps in the App Store. Please reconsider your pricing tactics.

So, let’s start this off by saying I am invested in this app enough to pay for a subscription. I am an adult in academia and have been diagnosed with ADD. Toggling between tasks and managing several aspects of my career make it difficult for me to focus on research and paper writing- elements essential to my career. On top of it all, i have a cubicle in a shared office space room and it is so easy to lose focus and get distracted from deep work. I got interested in this app after a Reddit suggestion, read about it, and was interested in the evidence- and research-based aspect. I’ve found that certain music in this app really does help boost my productivity. I gave it four stars because the whole concept is very helpful but it could be better. I also don’t normally write reviews, but I’m going to pay for the subscription and now I’m invested to see this get better. So, I’m writing this in hopes the developers take some suggestions to heart. Since this is also a data-driven app, my suggestions could be possible to implement. First, it would be helpful to see number of productivity sessions each day in a bar chart. Second, it would be helpful if the developers allowed space for users to record what they worked on during the productivity session. For example, # words written. It might also be helpful to have a smiley face for users to click on to indicate how they felt. This goes with years on productivity diaries for academic writing, but could be applied to other fields. At the minimum, it is helpful that we can record percent of productivity so that this could be applied to all workers, but it’d be nice if there were more specific work tracking options. Third, when my phone gets interrupted, such as with a phone call, the tracking stops. Please program this so that this partial session was recorded. In conclusion, my take is that if you are going to spend almost $100/year on this, more data tracking elements could be incorporated into the app.