About Focusly
A time-blocking day planner that lives in the macOS menu bar — built on the idea that a planning tool you have to switch to is a planning tool you stop opening.
What Focusly is for
A to-do list tells you what you owe. It has no opinion about whether it fits in the day, and no idea that you are in meetings until three. That gap — between a list that looks reasonable and an evening that did not go well — is what Focusly is built to close.
The method is not new. Put the work on a timeline, give each piece a start and an end, and let the shape of the day push back while you are still planning rather than at six in the evening. What tends to be missing is a tool that makes it cheap enough to keep doing on a Wednesday when everything has gone wrong.
Who makes it
Focusly is a one-person project, built by someone who got tired of starting every morning by copying the day’s work out of six other apps.
That is most of the explanation for how it works. One person cannot run infrastructure holding other people’s task data and still promise to keep it safe for years, so there is no server — your plan lives on your Mac and syncs through your own iCloud. No server means no recurring cost to fund, which is why you pay once instead of monthly.
It also means the sixteen integrations are not a checklist. They exist because the problem that started this was work arriving from too many places at once, and a planner that only reads your calendar does not fix that.
What I decided, and why
It should cost nothing to look
The single biggest reason planning tools get abandoned is that checking them costs a context switch. Focusly opens on a keystroke, over whatever you are working in, and disappears when you click away. Almost every design decision follows from that one.
Your plan is yours
Focusly will never move a block you placed. There is no scheduler quietly rearranging your week overnight. That rules out a category of features some people want, and I would rather be clear about it than half-do both.
No account, no server
Your tasks live on your Mac and sync through your own iCloud. There is no Focusly database with your schedule in it, nothing to sign up for, and nothing to export if you decide to leave.
Pay once
Because there is no server holding your data, there is no recurring cost to fund, so there is no subscription. Buy it once and it keeps working.
Meet the tools you already have
Most time blockers connect to a calendar and stop. Work does not arrive only from calendars — it arrives from Jira, GitHub, Slack, Reminders, Todoist and a dozen other places. Planning should not begin with copying things out of all of them.
What Focusly is not
Being clear about this saves everyone a trial.
- — It is not an auto-scheduler. If you want software to decide when things happen, tools built around that will serve you better.
- — The Mac is where the planning happens. There is no web app, and the iPhone, Apple Watch and Garmin companions being built are for seeing the day, acknowledging a block and rescheduling it — not for planning a week from a phone.
- — It is not a team tool. No shared boards, no assigning work. It plans one person's day.
Try it on a real week
Seven days, no card, no account. Long enough to hit at least one bad Tuesday, which is the only test that tells you anything.