Then technology skyrocketed in use, opening the door for the focus app craze. These apps promise to increase productivity by keeping people on task in a world full of distractions. These apps use a wide range of incentives, such as instant and tangible rewards, to keep users focused. Along the way, you’ll receive exclusive knitted prizes and plush room upgrades as rewards. These incentives are all designed to produce a more immersive, interactive and enticing app experience.
The increased use of smartphones has made the fight for our attention even more difficult. For most of us, our devices have become coping mechanisms, which easily shifts into distraction that steals the focus we need to make critical changes. With smartphones comes the popular belief that everyone’s attention span has just gotten worse in the last decade or so.
The Role of Incentives in Focus Apps
Focus apps use a similar approach, one that uses rewards to encourage longer-term engagement. These incentives act as rewards, encouraging users to fight off distractions and stay focused on what they need to get done. For example, Forest and Breathe apps both incentivize the user with special knitted produce or provide heavier suitcases after people master certain concentrating objectives.
Though these incentives sound great on the surface, it’s important for users to evaluate how well they work. And with many focus apps, users are invited to assess their experience a week later. This allows them to gauge whether they’ve actually been able to improve their concentration and productive time. This self-assessment allows users to discern whether the app meets their unique needs and guidelines for their own personal preferences.
Challenges of Maintaining Focus
Even with the major innovations that focus apps have brought to the table, the war on focus is still going strong. Thanks to the all-consuming nature of smartphones, it’s near impossible for workers to stay focused on their tasks. When millions of humans pick up devices to escape stress or boredom, productivity takes a hit.
Unfortunately, research shows that there’s a common misconception that people’s attention spans have gotten shorter. This claim just doesn’t hold up under the scrutiny of the scientific literature. It doesn’t take studies to tell us that people have a hard time concentrating nowadays. Our very basic capacity to pay attention has not drastically changed. This discrepancy begs the question, are focus apps helping to solve the causes of distraction—at least we hope that’s the ultimate goal.
Effectiveness of Gamified Focus Apps
Despite this, a wealth of research has already investigated the success of gamified focus apps in curbing phone usage. These applications integrate gamification techniques to keep users absorbed and foster a feeling of accomplishment. Gamified concentration software was rated incredibly highly by users, indicating that as it turns out, people kind of love this stuff. The real-world usage rates were shockingly low.
More recent research has found that less complex strategies are just as effective at decreasing mobile phone usage. These techniques will probably be more effective than any gamified strategy. For example, putting a smartphone into grayscale mode has become a popular and simple strategy for making the device less distracting. This process washes away brilliant colors, ones that are more likely to attract the eye. As a direct result, users are able to accomplish their goals more efficiently and effectively.
