AppFlow

When you’re trying to work, distractions seem to be everywhere.  You’re trying to concentrate on writing up a report when your twitter client pops up with a new tweet, you get an e-mail or someone calls.  The truth is that as long as your computer is connected to the internet, distractions are flowing into your computer at a rate of knots!  The Mac OS may be virtually virus free, but these distracting little devils like RSS feeds and social networks are almost as annoying!  They want to eat your workflow for breakfast!

Concentrate is a nifty little app that helps you block any and all distractions from your computer.  It works both on a very simple, and a very complex level to make sure that you stay concentrating on that report, project or (often in my case) blog post!

Interface

The main interface for Concentrate is relatively small.  It happily stays out of your way until you need it.

The interface it’self is simple, very simple.  You configure your most common tasks that require concentration and set a number of ‘actions’ for each one.  By clicking the large, tempting ‘concentrate’ button next to an activity, you trigger the actions.  These include:

• Launching / Closing / Blocking applications
• Launching / Blocking individual websites
• Playing sounds / spoken messages
• Changing desktop background and/or space
• Setting chat status

Each activity is easily identified by a little image.  There are a number of very appropriate icons to choose from, but adding your own is also very simple.

Blocking

It takes a while to get used to being told what you can and can’t do by a computer!  It is, however, one of the most useful tools that concentrate has.  For example, this morning I was trying to write a French essay, got bored and decided to open my twitter client, only to be ‘growled at’ by my computer!

I received a similar message when attempting to access Facebook in safari:

As annoying as this is, I soon had my French essay finished and concentrate re-enabled these blocked distractions!  It even opened the programs it had closed when I began to concentrate.  All of this can be easily customised in the ‘Edit Activity’ window.

Motivation

No matter how much a program blocks websites an applications, the user is ultimately in control.  I can tell you from experience that it takes quite a bit of will-power to not press the ‘Done’ button prematurely.  The guys behind concentrate obviously realised this as it comes with a range of different methods to keep you on task.

Have a favorite motivational line?  Tell concentrate and it will growl it at you, or even read it, at user defined intervals, or a user defined time before the end of your set concentration period.  Mine is kind of boring I know, but you get the idea!

For those of you who are more motivated by a nice little countdown timer, it’s got one of those as well!  In the ‘Edit Activity’ window you set the ‘default time to concentrate on this activity’.  As well as the slider it includes options for a user defined time, or indefinite concentration.

The Down Side

This app is by no means perfect, there are several little things that keep annoying me while I’m using it.  For example, the orange on the growl messages.  As nice as it is for a picture of an orange to appear every 5 minutes, I do wish I could change it, even to the pencil that I use for the ‘studying’ activity.

The blocking of websites doesn’t work with any browser other than Firefox and Safari.  This may be a significant problem to Chrome users (such as myself) and Opera users.  I would expect, however, that this feature is coming soon.

Conclusion

As with any app that interferes so much with your usage of your computer, it will get annoying!  The trick with concentrate is to learn how to use it best for you.  Set it too strict and you’ll always turn it off, too relaxed and you’ll keep getting distracted.  Once this balance has been found, I have no doubt that anyone could use this to significantly improve their workflow.