Focus Blocks

A Focus Block is StudiFoca’s unit of work. One block is 25 minutes.

When StudiFoca breaks an assignment into steps, it sizes each one in blocks — Review lab notes and raw data: 1 block · 25m. Write the Discussion: 2 blocks · 50m. That’s how the app knows a lab report is bigger than a reading response, and it’s what the workload heatmap is counting when it tells you next week looks heavy.

StudiFoca will not time you

There’s no countdown. Nothing starts when you sit down and nothing judges you when you get up.

That’s deliberate. The block takes its 25 minutes from the Pomodoro Technique — see Sources — and that technique works well for a lot of people. But a running timer does something specific to a brain that already has trouble starting: it turns I haven’t begun yet into a number that keeps getting bigger. For plenty of the students this app is built for, that isn’t motivation. It’s one more thing to feel bad about.

So StudiFoca uses the block for planning, and stops there. It’s a ruler, not a stopwatch. It answers how big is this? — never how long have you been sitting there?

If you like working to a timer, use whichever one you already trust. The blocks will still tell you what to aim at.