Focus apps have quickly gained popularity as a go-to solution for people looking to be more productive. These applications purport to help users focus on work by leveraging the power of competition, rewards and other motivators. What happened to the optimistic storyline was that recent research painted a more complicated picture of their effectiveness.
These apps utilize short-term, concrete outcomes to motivate users to stay engaged. In fact, rewards range from hand-knitted goods to complimentary hotel upgrades. This generates a highly personal motivational framework that forces you to keep playing catcher on the tasks most important to you. When users win or earn these rewards, they often experience a sense of achievement that helps to enhance their motivation to continue to play.
To help test whether these apps actually work, developers suggest that you rate your experience after a week of using the app. This option helps people judge if the focus app worked well to improve their workflow concentration. The underlying challenge is no less daunting. Staying focused is just really hard, thanks to our human desire to escape from boring work.
The Smartphone Dilemma
In an era where experimental digital arts and online creativity are thriving, smartphones find themselves at the center of most people’s coping mechanisms. Even though these devices give us an outlet for distraction, they often pull knowledge workers away from critical work that deserves our full attention and focus. Given the ubiquitous use of smartphones, it is important to understand how these devices might be affecting productivity and ability to concentrate.
Perhaps even more influential is the widespread belief that people’s ability to concentrate has deteriorated in recent years. This idea is why so many people have turned to focus apps with dreams of regaining their lost powers of concentration. Yet the scientific literature does not back up the common assumption that our ability to pay attention has declined in recent years. Research has shown that despite the pandemic of distractions, we haven’t completely lost our ability to concentrate.
A particularly famous example was a study of mobile phone usage. It focused on the many apps developed to encourage users to spend less time attached to these machines. Our analysis found that gamified focus apps consistently scored the highest in user sentiment. Users were enamored with the fun, engaging mechanisms that these applications employed. They almost never used them.
Effectiveness of Gamified Focus Apps
Even with the positive user sentiment that comes with these gamified focus apps, they don’t seem to be effective at creating longterm attention. Instead, emerging research indicates that these applications are much less effective than more straightforward strategies for decreasing mobile phone use. Putting a smartphone into grayscale mode is a simple intervention to make the device less addictive. You don’t have to dangle some fancy carrot to get them onboard!
Gamified productivity apps motivate users through time-based rewards and challenges. They frequently don’t address the underlying causes of distraction. Even more of them love the fun approach these apps have taken to productivity. They tend to find it difficult to maintain a laser focus on starting the right things. The effectiveness of these applications will surely vary based on personal aesthetic choices and working styles.
If you’re serious about improving your productivity, don’t jump the gun. Evaluate the benefits of gamified concentration apps and weigh them against less complex approaches that could turn out to be more successful. This decision to adopt multifaceted engagement approaches is key in figuring out how to get long-term attention span.
