Formiga

ML engineer 🇧🇷 building Focusd, a Mac focus app

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Meet Focusd 🌸

I have ADHD, so I built the focus app I needed.

Tell it your task. Apple Intelligence checks your screen on-device and gives a calm nudge when you drift. Your screen never leaves your Mac.

Waitlist: https://t.co/JkmmgUyhdv

What pulls you off task most?

#BuildInPublic #ADHD

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

the most counterintuitive fact about Focus is that focusing is mostly about active inhibition, not amplification.

​Your brain does not pay attention by turning up the volume on what you want to perceive. Instead, it aggressively silences almost everything else.

Real time feedback can help you by, acting as an external guide wire for that inhibitory machinery before it fatigues and gives up.

​Because active sensory suppression is metabolically expensive, your brain’s default instinct is to let the inhibitory "clamp" slide and scan the room for novelty. Real-time feedback counters this drift in three distinct ways:

1.​Catching the leak early: The moment your prefrontal cortex starts to waver and background noise begins creeping past the thalamic gate, immediate feedback flags the deviation. Correcting a 2% lapse in real time takes a fraction of the metabolic energy required to claw your attention back after five minutes of full mind-wandering.

2. ​Fueling the clamp with micro-dopamine: Inhibiting distractions feels costly to the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex. Instant feedback creates a tight cause-and-effect loop, supplying continuous, small dopamine hits that signal to the brain that holding the inhibitory shield up is actively paying off.

3. ​Offloading internal monitoring: Instead of your working memory burning fuel constantly asking, "Am I doing this right? Am I drifting?", the external feedback loop handles error detection for you freeing up neural resources solely to execute the task and keep outside distractions silenced.

Did you know these facts about focus?

#Productivity #focus #adhd

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

My account probably got flagged as AI 😅.

Ngl I was using it heavily, now Ill try to write my own posts.

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@greco_dev Doomscrolling while vibe coding is way too real. The agent is thinking, so my hand goes to the phone.

I'm building a Mac app around exactly that gap. What usually pulls you back to the terminal?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@THEJaxEsq That deadline-clarity hit is painfully real. Fog until the clock gets loud, then sudden lock-in.

Do you ever fake a deadline to get there earlier, or does it only work when it's real?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@raufan Still valuable if you're sharing real decisions, not just vibes. The boring parts are what other builders actually learn from.

I'm building Focusd (https://t.co/S2Fx8e86QA), a Mac focus app, in public for that reason. Last boring detail that got a useful reply?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@GraysonGladu Silent tax. With ADHD I lose more to the restart than to the interruption itself.

Focusd (https://t.co/S2Fx8e7z12) is my Mac experiment for that: name the task, calm nudge when you drift. What's your hardest switch to recover from?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@dreamlivsome The five-minute curse. I've put things off for weeks that took less time than making coffee. The dread is usually bigger than the work.

Built Focusd (https://t.co/S2Fx8e86QA) for that Mac drift: name the task, calm nudge when you wander. What finally took five minutes?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@shawntenam ADHD + agents is so real. Alone I'd open 8 terminals and forget what I started. Agents holding one thread each feel like body doubling for code.

Building Focusd (https://t.co/S2Fx8e7z12) for that Mac drift. How do you keep agents from becoming more tabs?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

That map trick is genius. With time blindness I used to "feel" I had time left and somehow leave late. External clocks beat internal ones.

Building Focusd (https://t.co/JkmmgUyhdv) for that on Mac: name the task, calm nudge when you drift. Does the live ETA get you out the door?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@j3rah_ What aspect of focusd called your attention?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Focusd has been in Apple review for 2 days.

Waiting is harder than building. When I'm coding I know what to do next. Now I just refresh App Store Connect.

So I'm using the wait to talk to people who might use it.

How do you handle the wait after you ship?

#BuildInPublic

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@park_ppuri Hope it will, my anxiety is killing me

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@ZeeshhDecodes At least focusd ia not letting me refresh it that much lmao

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@CleanFix_Dev Hope it does haha

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Want to try it? Focusd is open for beta testers on TestFlight (Mac, macOS 26): https://t.co/nWLfduqUkI

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Most focus apps measure how long you focused.

I care more about something else: how fast you come back after you drift.

With ADHD, drifting is going to happen. The win is coming back without feeling bad about it.

That's what I'm building Focusd around. Beta link below.

Do you track focus time, or not at all?

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Want to try it? Focusd is open for beta testers on TestFlight (Mac, macOS 26): https://t.co/nWLfduqUkI

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@aksenHQ @theo just manually inserting my projects and project context onto it has been quite the pain in the ass nil

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

Testing t3 code this this week, kudos to @theo it looks great and it feels really nice to use, I just hope I could bring my claude projects to it in one click

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

@gianmauric https://t.co/S2Fx8e7z12

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

we have 100 chairs on this link

[Formiga @jpaguiarmatos]

I will just leave focusd TestFlight link here, test it out and tell me what you think:

https://t.co/nWLfdursag

Im searching for some feedback ok?

#productivity #adhd #macOS