Focus Hero: Goals & Habits

I have a few criticisms and suggestions about this app but overall I really like it and I do find it helpful. Usually when I pick up an app that claims to help with adhd by making lists or giving you motivation I just don’t find them motivating. I like that I can record what I’m doing and get a prize for it, I like the cute art and I like customizing the hero. My few suggestions would be… the subscription doesn’t really feel worth it, due to the only thing you receive is the pets and expanded adventure mode, but I’m sure the features will be expanded. I don’t like that the pets are locked behind a paywall, but that’s just because I absolutely can’t afford it and I have a lot of coins I want to use. My second suggestion is adding a daily log in reward, such as coins, or a level upgrade in a certain category like defense. My third suggestion is that with the skills, really cool feature, but when it comes to the hero customization there’s not much you can get unless you work on defense and meditation, and the others don’t play as big of a part. I would like if they did play a bigger part! Genuinely this app has helped me out a lot it gives me something fun to think about and do once I’m done with my tasks for the day, and so far I’ve been using it every day and I’m enjoying it! :) thank you developers!!

I’ve tried countless apps meant to motivate you and improve your productivity. This is the only one that has worked from day one. The little hit of dopamine you get for finishing your focus session on category of task you choose definitely has worked like nothing else. Finishing a focus session grants you xp in what ever attribute you choose to level up with your hero as well as grants you 3 random drops of items or gold plus focus energy. Items change your hero’s look and stats, and gold can be spent on buying a nicer home. There has been feedback about more uses for gold and I’m sure that will be implemented at some point. Between sessions you can enter adventure mode, where what you can do is limited by your focus energy. Save a character, unlock an artifact, grow some plants, open up new sections of the world, fight in trials, all of these require focus energy. This ends up motivating you to do more focus sessions. The trials are what really make me want to level up my character. The first trial is very difficult, and to even attempt it you’ll need to train your hero. The classic game loop of “play”, meaning doing more and longer focus sessions, and earn rewards that you can spend and use to strengthen and customize your character, is an addicting one. It’s why basically every game you can play nowadays rewards players for playing the game. It becomes addicting, but this time you’re going to be addicted to focusing on the task at at hand.

I’ve been using this a few days and I really love it. It’s a great idea and well-executed. Totally worth using in its current state, but with some further refinement could be even better. I see the developer is still actively working on it! That’s great. I’d like to see less strict adherence to the pomodoro style optionally. I track things like workouts in other apps so if I could add them here manually that would be amazing. Its not great to have to start a timer here, open another app, start tracking there, and make sure the pomodoro timer resolves correctly and I’ve pre-estimated the time correctly. I find myself trying to work around the pomodoro aspect of the app at times. It would also be nice to suffer a penalty for ending early as opposed to no credit (optionally) and be able to get some credit for being focused longer than the original timer (again I find myself trying to work around the timer when I focus longer than expected, sometimes having gone 30m over, I then just start a new timer for 30m to get the credit, but I’m actually not even doing that task anymore (because I didn’t set the new timer as soon as the old timer finished). So in a nutshell, maybe a set of tweaks that allow you to break out of pomodoro mode if desired? I do think having strict pomodoro as the default behavior is good though, I totally get it.