Focus On This

I get distracted a lot. The Internet is an enabler for me, I open Safari or Chrome to do something and 3 hours later I've been down a hundred paths and if I'm lucky some of those were tangentially related to what I set out to do in the first place.

There are a number of tricks I use to stay focused, like taking notes, writing down next steps for everything, and then always referring back to those notes. Only keeping a couple apps open at once. Not opening hackernews or any news site for that matter. Only opening my Twitter or email client a few times a day.

Today I decided to take things a step further. The screen I see most often on my computer is the new tab screen in Safari and Chrome, so I put the thing I should be focused on front and center.

Installation

Use git to clone this repository to your local machine. Example:

$ cd ~/Sites
$ git clone https://github.com/jonmagic/focus-on-this.git

Now create a symlink to the focus executable in a directory that is a part of your path.

$ ln -s /path/to/focus-on-this/focus /usr/local/bin/focus

Next I set my home page in Safari to be file:///path/to/focus-on-this/this.html (replace the path/to with the appropriate path).

For Chrome I set the homepage and then had to install the Replace New Tab Page extension and then configure it to open new tabs to file:///path/to/focus-on-this/this.html.

Usage

You can update your focus by using the focus on command or by editing the html page directly.

$ focus on Getting flowers for our anniversary.

You can see your current focus in the browser of course or by running the focus command by itself.

$ focus
Focus On Getting flowers for our anniversary.

Contributors

• @jonmagic

License

See LICENSE.