The app that began
as a note to myself.
Halfway down a page, I’d get an idea for my next class. By the time I finished the paragraph, it might already be gone.
I wanted to keep the thought. I wanted to keep reading.
That was the spark. What if I could catch an idea and go right back to the line I’d left? I started making a little tool to do just that. As I built it, more ideas came. That little tool grew into FocusPlz.
What happens in 25 minutes?
A little room to think.
The ideas I most wanted to keep tended to arrive after I’d settled into my work. My first design was a simple blue ring counting down from 25:00. It gave me permission to stay with one thing.
On my Mac today, I pick one task from Today’s Route. Eight planetary orbits trace the passing time. Some days I put on quiet music. Some days the silence is enough.
A bottle beside the book.
I used to put ideas in Notes. Later I’d find half a sentence with no memory of what I meant. If I waited until I finished the chapter, even that much might be gone.
So I put a little bottle beside the timer. When a thought comes, my hands stay on the keyboard. I leave a few words in the bottle and go back to the line I was reading. There’s something restful about knowing the thought will wait for me.
The part I nearly gave up on.
FocusHub kept time. InsightJar held ideas. Bringing them together took more attempts than I expected. I kept this picture of the hourglass because the countdown worked, even though I never got the sand to fall the way I imagined.
More than once, an update undid details I had just finished. I thought about stopping. Then I’d open a book and have another thought I wanted to save. That was usually enough to get me back to the prototype.
I put FocusPlz in the bottle, too.
One of my own entries was a wish to turn FocusHub into an app. I can still open it and see the words I wrote before I knew how to build it.
Every idea I save becomes a pearl in my underwater jar. As I work on it, I add small steps to the original note. When I mark the dream as complete, its pearl settles on the seabed. That same dream lights up as a star above the timer on my home screen.
The next time I sit down to read, the tool keeping me company is the very thing I once hoped to make.
KIKI
Glimmer Bay.
A little light from someone you may never meet.
Some bottles are for someone else.
I made the first bottle to hold a thought for myself. Later I wondered what it would feel like to open one after a hard day and find a few kind words from a stranger.
I hope a small moment from my corner of the world finds someone in theirs. Sometimes kindness is as simple as reading a few lines and noticing what mattered to the person who wrote them.
From a spark to a star.
“I want to turn FocusHub into an app.” I wrote that in my dream journal before I knew how to build it.
Now, when a thought comes to me halfway down a page, I save it as a pearl in FocusPlz and go back to reading. When I finish what I set out to do, that pearl becomes a star above my timer.
