Focused User Guide

Focused is a different kind of todo list. It’s not meant to maximise your productivity and for you to do as much as you possibly can, instead it lets you create a rough outline over the next few weeks, without scheduling too much for any day.

Task Limits

At the heart of Focused are daily task limits. You can configure how many tasks you can manage to do per day, and and which days you want to work.

Focused can then clean up your schedule to make sure you’re not over your set limit for each day. It can also automatically defer tasks you did not complete in time, because sometimes things just take longer than expected.

Projects

Projects are the different areas of your tasks. You can each task to one project, each project has a title and a color, which is used to highlight the task in the month and list views.

Additionally you can access your projects in the sidebar (on iPad and Mac) or the main view (iPhone), where you’ll get a sortable list of just the tasks assigned to that project.

These views are meant primarily to give you an overview and to quickly schedule later tasks of a specific project.

Priorities

Each task can have a priority from none / low / medium / high. These priorities can be used to sort tasks in lists, but they are also important for clean up: Tasks with lower priorities are deferred first, if a task is above the set task limit.

Scheduling

Tasks can be scheduled for a specific day, the can be set to “Later” or “Anytime”.

Later tasks are tasks waiting to scheduled and are only shown in projects and the “Later” view.

Anytime is intended for tasks too small to count towards your daily task limit, but that you still should not forget to do. They are always displayed in the Today view, but not the Planned view.

App Views

The app consists of 4 basic views: Today, Planned, Later and Archive.

• The Today view shows the tasks scheduled for today, plus overdue tasks, plus tasks set to Anytime. Everything you should be doing today.
• The Planned view gives you an overview over your scheduled tasks, and lets you reschedule with drag and drop.
• The Later view shows you all tasks you’ve set aside for later. You can quickly schedule them by dragging a task to the Planned or Today view in the sidebar.
• The Archive shows you your done tasks.

URL Scheme

You can directly add a new task with the following URLs:

focused://addTask?title=[string]&note=[string]&group=[name]&canDefer=[true|false]&date=[iso8601]

The x-callback scheme is also supported:

focused://x-callback-url/addTask?title=[string]&note=[string]&group=[name]&canDefer=[true|false]&date=[iso8601]&x-success=[URL]&x-error=[URL]

Alternatively you can open the Add Task view, with any fields pre-filled using the following URL:

focused://showAddTask?title=[string]&note=[string]&group=[name]&canDefer=[true|false]&date=[iso8601]