Choosing Mac apps when your attention is unreliable
Lists of “best ADHD apps” tend to recommend the same well-known productivity tools with a paragraph about focus bolted on. That is not very useful, because the thing that decides whether an app helps is rarely a feature. It is a handful of properties that almost nobody advertises.
Here is what to actually look for, in any app, whatever it does.
Practical suggestions, not clinical advice.
It has to be free to check
If seeing your plan costs a context switch — find the window, wait for it, lose your place — you will not check it. Not because you lack discipline, but because the cost is real and it recurs twenty times a day.
Look for: a global keyboard shortcut, a menu bar presence, something that appears over a fullscreen app rather than switching you out of it, and information visible without opening anything at all.
The single best property a planning tool can have is that glancing at it is nearly free.
The clock has to be outside your head
Any tool that expects you to notice time passing is making an assumption that may not hold.
Look for: a countdown you can see without going to look for it, a progress indicator rather than only digits, and an ending that actually interrupts. A timer that only speaks when it finishes tells you nothing during the part where you needed telling.
Best of all is a timer that stays on screen after you have switched to the thing you are meant to be doing.
It must not punish you for a bad week
This is the property that decides whether an app survives past week three, and it is never in a feature list.
When you abandon the plan for three days, what does the app do when you come back? Some greet you with a wall of overdue red. Some ask you to process a hundred-item backlog. Both are, in practice, a reason not to open it.
Look for: templates or saved structures you can apply to rebuild a day in one action, an easy way to bulk-clear or bulk-move, and a design that treats a gap as a gap rather than a failure.
It should ask for as little setup as possible
Any app that needs a taxonomy before it is useful will get an elaborate taxonomy built during a burst of enthusiasm, and then be abandoned, because maintaining it is its own job.
Look for: usable on day one with no configuration, optional structure rather than required, and no obligation to categorise things you do not care about.
Be suspicious of your own enthusiasm during setup. The version of you that builds a twelve-project hierarchy is not the version that has to maintain it.
It should show you what actually happened
Not to score you. Because the useful information — how long things really take, which hours you are actually productive, what you consistently over-commit — is invisible from the inside if your sense of elapsed time is unreliable.
Look for: planned versus actual duration, completion by time of day, and completion by block length. That last one tells you your workable block length faster than anything else.
It should not need the internet or an account
Two reasons. The obvious one: an app that fails when the connection does is an app that fails you at the worst moment.
The less obvious one: sign-up is a start, and starts are expensive. An app you can download and use immediately gets used. An app that wants an email, a password, a verification link and an onboarding flow has four places to lose you before you have seen it work.
The uncomfortable one: fewer apps
The strongest predictor of whether a system survives is how many places it lives in.
Two apps that each hold half your commitments is worse than one app holding all of them badly, because now you have to remember which half is where — and that lookup is exactly the kind of small friction that ends habits.
If you are choosing between a specialist tool that is excellent at one thing and a broader one that is decent at three, the broader one is usually the better bet. This is the opposite of the normal advice, and it is right more often than not.
Focusly was built around most of these — a menu bar panel on a keystroke, a menu bar countdown and a detachable timer, templates for rebuilding a wrecked week, analytics that compare planned with actual, and no account required. Whether it suits you is a different question, and the properties above are worth applying to it as sceptically as to anything else.