The bean just wants to knit.
With their back to me, Poe, the name I gave the animated brown bean in the Focus Friend app, is stitching up a little storm that will eventually become socks—if I can leave them alone. Unfortunately, I need to check my texts. I cancel the timer after six minutes, which warns me that Poe’s knitting will unravel and “they’ll be really sad.” Their shoulders slump as their work falls apart and a little bubble appears over their head. “It’s ok, we tried,” they reassure me. It turns out the text I was so desperate to see was spam.
Focus Friend, a productivity timer app designed to keep your off your phone by essentially taking it over to knit, has climbed the mobile charts over the last few days, and as of this writing sits at No. 2 on Google Play and No. 3 on the App Store. The brainchild of developer Bria Sullivan and YouTuber and author Hank Green, it briefly beat out apps like ChatGPT, TikTok and the now infamous Tea.
Focus Friend isn’t the first of its kind, but rather the latest in a growing movement of apps, including Forest, Focus Traveler, Exocus, and Focus Tree, designed to keep users from doomscrolling or dawdling on their phones. Like the Pomodoro method, the time management technique that breaks work into periods of focus and rest, these apps use a timer to encourage users to lock in and tune out everything else. Unlike the traditional, analog Pomodoro, apps have gamified the experience with rewards. For every successful chunk of time I allow the bean to knit uninterrupted, it makes me socks I can then broker for decorations. These go straight into the bean’s living space, a tiny brown room with wood floors that feels woefully empty of any life. I have the power to make the bean’s life better, if only I can keep myself from scrolling.
Sullivan has smartly designed the app in a way that instills a little bit of guilt and a little bit of love for this legume with a Hank Hill ass. (Green, she says, dictated this specific design: “He said the character should be a bean, and it should have a butt crack,” Sullivan says.) Users are asked to name their bean, which wanders around its room making puns (“Beenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Beanage Wasteland”) and wondering in little speech bubbles about “if beans have parents.” Sullivan says it was important to make sure the bean had not only a personality but also a point of view. It gets a little nostalgic about its own past, or wonders about who it is now. “That makes people more emotionally invested in what’s happening,” Sullivan says.
McKenna, a 19-year-old Focus Friend user who declined to give their last name, agrees with that sentiment, crediting the bean’s persona with making the app more “fun” and approachable. Although they’ve found the Pomodoro method and productivity timers to be helpful in general, McKenna says they previously haven’t been able to find one they liked until now. “I have also been using Focus Friend to set a timer for myself in the morning so I am more motivated to be off of my phone and get out of bed,” they add.
Still, even the bean isn’t immune from the siren song of a phone. Sullivan made sure to include them enjoying a little scroll, tongue out, when the app is placed into a break between focus sessions. When we talk on the phone, Sullivan herself is multitasking. She’s busy changing a diaper. “I feel like I use my phone against my will, most of the time,” she says. “I feel kind of addicted to it.” Instead of being present, Sullivan says, she’s always scrolling. “There's times where I feel like I should be focusing on my baby while she’s, like, eating, or meditating and just being present,” she says, adding that “there's a lot of guilt that comes with owning a phone and participating in technology these days.”
People are trying to lower their phone use. Over the past several years, there’s been a growing “dumb phone” movement—ditching smartphones for devices that cut off access to modern parts of the internet or apps—to reclaim attention span from the scourge of screens. Others have tried “bricking” their phones, a controlled blocking of things like social media apps. Personally, I have to mute notifications, throw my phone into another room, and set a timer for at least an hour to keep myself from the clarion call of my barely functioning, cracked iPhone 12 mini.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span, has been tracking and studying our ability to focus for nearly two decades. Thanks to a constant barrage of things like mobile phones, social media, short-form video, and powerful algorithms like those on TikTok, our attention spans are on the decline.
“Every time you go onto the screen, it’s a gateway to an entire world,” Mark says. “On the one hand, it's the [phone] interface you're looking at, but there's also this entryway to all this other information and people.You can access things so fast—a thought pops into your head, you can immediately go and Google it and find the answer. We're used to scrolling.”
As much as I love and swear by all things Pomodoro, Mark says it would be better for people to use their own free will and agency to control their attention spans. “Whether you use the Pomodoro method, or whether you use software blocking tools, you're offloading it onto a device,” she says. “The device is doing the work.”
That doesn’t make apps like Focus Friend bad, she says, but we should be mindful of how we use them. “It's really powerful to have the agency to be able to pay attention when you want to,” she says. “If you're constantly offloading the work of being disciplined to a device, you never learn the skill of being able to pay attention on your own.”
People who struggle with their focus can benefit from using apps, she adds, “but I would rather see that device being used to allow people to wean themselves off of the app so that they're not so dependent on it.”
Perhaps she’s onto something. As much as I love the cartoon charm of Focus Friend and the soothing little tune it plays while Poe is knitting, I keep using my one wild and precious life to interrupt them. Robo text. Uber Eats promo. Friend sending gossip about someone I don’t know.
So far, I’ve only been able to focus long enough to help my bean get a little plant and some dirty laundry. I hope to get them a nice window soon.
