Fokus with ADHD

Most productivity systems are secretly willpower systems: they work great until the day you can't make yourself care, and then they become another thing you've failed at. If you have ADHD (or just a brain that behaves like it some weeks), the fix isn't trying harder — it's moving the executive function out of your head and into the system.

That's what this page is: not a lecture about focus, but a concrete Fokus setup where remembering, deciding, starting, and time itself are outsourced to the app.

1. Externalize everything — your head is a terrible inbox

Working memory is usually the first thing ADHD taxes. The rule that fixes it: if it matters, it goes in the app within five seconds, or it never existed.

• ⌘+K from anywhere, .buy cat food — captured, done thinking about it. No forms, no filing decisions. The Spotlight one-liner is your five-second window.
• Don't sort while capturing. Half-formed tasks are fine: TEA fills in the priority, estimate, and bucket you didn't have bandwidth for.
• Thoughts that aren't tasks go to Notes (N); tasks with no date yet live guilt-free in the Reservoir.

2. Let the scheduler make the decisions

"What should I do now?" is the most expensive question of an ADHD day — every open decision is a chance for the wrong tab to win. So stop deciding:

• Turn on Smart Scheduling and let it lay out the day. You wake up to a plan that already exists — the Morning Briefing reads it to you (literally; there's an audio button).
• Day View answers now what? with exactly one card. Not the whole terrifying list — the one thing, and what's next.
• Plan collapsed by 2 PM? That's not failure, that's Tuesday. Optimize Schedule rebuilds the rest of the day in one click. No cleanup shame spiral.
• Not ready to commit to something? Leave it in the Reservoir. By default those undated tasks still get auto-placed — but if a growing backlog starts crowding your day, flip on Settings → AI Scheduling → Exclude Reservoir from scheduling and they stay a guilt-free holding pen until you decide they're real.

3. Make time visible (time blindness is real)

"I have plenty of time" and "where did the day go" are the same sentence, five hours apart. Fokus puts clocks on everything:

• The timeline panel in Kanban shows today as actual, physical space — with a red line marching through it. Time becomes something you can see.
• The NEXT line on Day View ("Beta community call in 1h 28m") is a countdown, not an abstract afternoon.
• Start a timer on the task you're doing. The elapsed-vs-estimate bar is external time sense — and Pomodoro mode turns "work on the report" into "survive 25 minutes," which is a game you can win.

4. Shrink the task until starting is trivial

Task initiation isn't laziness — big vague tasks simply have no handle to grab. Manufacture handles:

• Break anything scary into subtasks — or make ODA do the breaking-down for a whole goal, so you never face "Launch the project" as a single monolith.
• Turn on chunking for long tasks and the scheduler serves them as several small sittings instead of one impossible afternoon.
• Genuinely stuck? Open the task and use the "Ask AI to help with this task…" bar — describing the stuckness to Captain Fokus usually shakes the first step loose.

5. Work the dopamine, don't fight it

• Keep task celebration on (Settings → General) — the confetti is not childish, it's a reward schedule.
• Check things off in Kanban and watch the day counter climb (1/6… 2/6…). Progress you can see is progress that keeps pulling.
• Low-energy hour? Filter for light tasks and stack three quick wins. Momentum is a resource — see Energy Management.

6. Kill the distractions at the source

• Immersive Mode (Alt+I) empties the screen; Deep Fokus & DND silences Slack/Teams so the interruptions can't even start.
• Quiet hours in Notifications keep pings from colonizing your evening.
• Hyperfocus cuts both ways — the timer's break bell and the NEXT countdown are your tether back when four hours vanish into the wrong (or right!) thing.

7. Built-in forgiveness (this is the important one)

Every ADHD productivity story has the same villain: the system that worked for nine days and then collapsed under one bad one, taking your self-respect with it. Fokus is built to absorb bad days:

• Unfinished tasks roll over automatically — tomorrow they're just scheduled, not glowing red with accusation. (The briefing will honestly note "rolled over 15 times" — information, not judgment.)
• The End-of-Day Review leads with what you did finish — evidence against the "did nothing today" feeling, collected nightly.
• Nothing requires streaks, and no view punishes absence. Come back after three chaotic days, hit Optimize, and you're current again in one click.