A Log of Rejections

I wanted the focus item to stand out a bit more. The focus feature pins the task you’re currently concentrating on at the top of the task list. It feels prominent the moment you pin it, but within a few seconds it blends back in with the other tasks. That bothered me.

So I tried a bunch of things. Most of them got deleted.

Rejected in earlier sessions

• Border comet: A glowing dot traveling slowly around the card’s border. It caught the eye, but too loudly. Cancelled.
• Pulse: The whole card gently throbbing on a cycle. Good intention — a heartbeat feel — but in practice, distracting.

Both of these were built and retracted before today.

Rejected today

1. Breathing glow

I layered a faint tint on top of the focused card and had it fade in and out on a 3.6-second cycle. Like breathing. Subtle motion, enough to draw the eye without feeling busy. That was the hope.

“I don’t like the background pulse.”

Bumping the amplitude didn’t change the verdict. Something constantly moving behind the content ended up feeling intrusive rather than inviting.

2. Crank it up — in red

If motion is the problem, what if we went statically bold? I changed the shadow color, the border color, and the inner tint all to a vivid red, and thickened the shadow. Even pulled the Focus label bar into the same red for visual cohesion. Vibrant.

“Let’s revert the color.”

Too strong. Read as a warning rather than a highlight.

3. Elapsed-time pill

Shifted to an informational angle. Added a small pill below the task title showing 12:34-style elapsed time since the task started, updated every second. A steady reminder of how much time you’ve already spent on this.

“Watching the time creates way too much pressure.”

Counting up by the second is inherently constricting. Instead of motivation, it feels like surveillance.

4. Pomodoro

If elapsed time feels pressuring, a countdown — the opposite direction — should be fine, right? I built a full Pomodoro timer. 25-minute focus → 5-minute break → a longer break every 4th cycle. Notifications at each phase boundary. In-card start and stop controls. Cycle counter. Full state management, a global ticker, local notification scheduling, components — everything.

“It’s kind of useless.”

Meaning: I built it, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually use it. Implementation was done, but the need wasn’t. Deleted everything.

5. Full-screen focus mode

Forget solving this inside the list — change the screen. I added a “Focus Mode ↑” button on the right of the focus separator. Tapping it navigated to a full-screen modal showing just the focused task’s title, large and centered. Everything else removed.

“Task Detail is already Focus Mode.”

Fair. Tapping a task to open its detail screen already gives you exactly that — a single task, alone on the screen. No need for a second version.

What I didn’t delete

The hourly completion heatmap. A 24-cell horizontal strip on the Activity screen, shading each hour darker the more tasks I completed in it. No explicit “your peak is around 3 PM” message — just the strip.

It doesn’t touch the focus UI at all. It’s a sideways answer to the original problem, but it survived — and that alone makes it today’s result.

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That’s it for today. Worked hard.