Photo by Matese Fields on Unsplash

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You start a new school year full of ambition and enthusiasm…. this year I will be laser-focused!

Soon each day of class becomes more of a struggle. You sit listening in class when you start to catch your mind drifting… one minute you are focused on psychology, the next on wondering how many siblings Mark Wahlberg has.

You end up spending the rest of the class fighting on and off with your daydreams and ultimately missing out on a chunk of the lesson.

Accidental naps don’t help.

You are not alone. Students worldwide struggle with poor attention control. In fact, one study found that when students were asked to report their thoughts at certain moments during lecture, students reported “task unrelated thoughts” about 33% of the time.

If you are like me, this is a persistent issue that holds you back from being the productive person that you want to be.

The Apple Watch is the perfect tool for hacking your ability to be focused. When you are zoning out in the middle of class, you need something that will silently nudge you back into an alert state of mind. Nujible is a simple brain-hacking app that gives you a subtle, periodic nudge in the form of silent haptic taps on your Apple Watch.

Imagine you are in class and your mind begins to drift… Cupcake Wars, must remember to buy toilet paper, why isn’t Pluto a planet? You can’t seem to keep your mind under control. There is one hour of lecture left, and you know that you will not be able to maintain your concentration for the entire lesson. You launch Nujible on your Apple Watch, select how often and how long you want to get nudged (for example, every 4 minutes for one hour), and hit start!

Launch Nujible with quick controls on the Apple Watch

You return your focus to the lesson, but sure enough your mind begins to wander again. Before your brain goes too far down the rabbit hole, Nujible sends you a subtle tap on your wrist (in the form of a notification) that snaps you back into focus.

Wait, won’t I be distracted by the notifications? In a way, yes — but that is the goal! Nujible is ideal for anyone who feels that they need a tool to periodically interrupt and redirect their overactive mind from persistent inattentiveness. In a short time, your brain learns to treat every buzz as a nudge that pushes you to get your head back in the game!

Besides helping students pay attention in class, there are a variety of use cases for this app, including helping users to:

Stay focused while reading, instead of blanking out on an entire page.

Maintain concentration while studying, instead of getting distracted constantly.

Stay alert during meetings, instead of nodding off.

Which has definitely never happened to me, by the way.

With this simple Apple Watch hack, no longer does your productivity and performance need to be limited by the current state of your willpower…

You no longer have to spend immense amounts of energy trying to stay focused instead of on the actual task itself…

You can now be confident that you will get the most out of your (very expensive) classes, even when you are not completely engrossed in the topic…

And finally you can stop wasting so much time goofing off in your head and learn to catch yourself when you are distracted and return to an alert state of mind.

I struggled with this issue so frequently that I began to wish that I could pay someone to sit next to me and nudge me occasionally to make sure I was paying attention. I thought that surely there was an Apple Watch app for that, but since I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for, I decided to build it myself. If you relate to fighting off persistent daydreams, dealing with ADD or ADHD symptoms, or even just struggling with a scatterbrain, perhaps a simple hack is worth a try.

Nujible is free to try out on the App Store for your Apple Watch or iPhone.

And in case you were wondering, Marky Mark is the youngest of nine siblings.