I Made an App That Distracts Me to Help Me to Focus Sergio Follow Apr 16, 2018 · 4 min read

Hostage to My Daydreams

If I’m honest, I didn’t always pay attention in my college lectures. My mind was usually somewhere else entirely while I took notes on everything that was written on the board (a technique that I learned to master). This is not a strategy that I would recommend to college students. Did I mention that I majored in engineering?

I promise I learned the material on my own much more effectively. (Photo by sean Kong on Unsplash)

I would always daydream a lot as a kid, but it became noticeably more problematic in college. I found that my mind was constantly jumping from one idea, fantasy, or philosophical conundrum to the next, making it challenging to concentrate on one task for an extended period of time (classroom lectures, for example). I suspect that my brain has become accustomed to the constant use of my smartphone, and this addiction may be partially to blame for the need to be constantly stimulated and for developing a shorter attention span. I know I am far from alone in this.

I can’t be the only one switching between 5 apps at a time, right? (Photo by Tom Holmes on Unsplash)

I don’t claim to have an undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder, but let’s just say I have definitely caught myself in the middle of class thinking about sudden hijacking scenarios and how heroic I would probably maybe be. Meanwhile, I had missed a chunk of the lesson and could only hope it wasn’t important.

Daydreaming a Solution

One night I sat down to listen to a lecture that I was genuinely interested in, but I knew that my mind would be constantly wandering and I would have trouble staying focused. In my wandering thoughts, I wished that I could pay someone to sit next to me and nudge me every few minutes to make sure I was paying attention and actually absorbing the material. After realizing that an app would be a more effective solution, I did a quick search and could not find the tool that I was looking for.

How is there not an app for that?! (Photo by Francisco Moreno on Unsplash)

So being an engineer, I set out to try and solve this problem myself. I worked with very talented freelancers (I did not yet have the tool I needed to sit through more lectures), and a few months later Nujible: Get Focused Now was on the App Store.

How does it work? Nujible gives users a subtle, periodic nudge on their Apple Watch or iPhone that reminds them to stay focused. Imagine a student requesting to be (silently) nudged once every 4 minutes over the course of a 1 hour lecture. It can be used to help pay attention in class, stay focused while reading, stay alert during meetings, concentrate while studying and more.

Nujible: Get Focused Now on the Apple Watch

Daydreaming Interrupted

Wait, isn’t that distracting? Yes… but that’s kind of the point. I needed a tool that would periodically interrupt the persistent daydreams that took over my mind. I needed a tool that occasionally snapped me back into focus.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that the ideal long term solution is to work on improving mindfulness and concentration over time. Nujible is not a cure for an overactive mind, just a tool to defeat the symptoms when you need to get focused now.

What’s more, after only a few minutes of use I found that I had trained my brain to stop responding to the buzzing and was no longer as desperate to check for notifications every single time my phone vibrated.

Is it ironic that I daydreamed a solution to stop myself from daydreaming? Is it ironic that my proposed solution to a problem partially caused by smartphone addiction is a smartphone app? I don’t know, I’m not some kind of deep-thinking philosopher. I’m just an engineer who went to school to learn to solve problems.