How to find your peak focus window, and test whether it is real

The Analytics screen in the picture above is calling out 6pm to 8pm as a peak focus window. If you read advice about productivity, you would expect a morning. The person in that screenshot does their best work when the rest of the world has stopped sending them things.

That is the useful part of measuring this: your window is not the one in the book. There is also a trap in it, and this post is about both.

What the chart shows

FocusLens watches which app is in front and sorts your time into categories. Analytics turns that into two views. A heatmap lays the week out by hour, so you can see the shape of it at a glance. An hourly productivity chart names your peak window in words. The Today screen repeats that as a coaching insight.

If your main tool is filed in the wrong category, all of this is wrong, so fix that first. The categories post takes five minutes and rewrites your history around your answer.

The trap

The chart tells you when you were focused. It does not tell you when you could have been.

Suppose your team's standup is at 10 and your meetings run until 3. Your productive hours will pile up at 4pm, and FocusLens will honestly report a late afternoon peak. That might be your best time. It might just be the first free time you get. A calendar can manufacture a peak window, and if you build your week around it you have only agreed with your calendar.

So treat the first answer as a hypothesis.

Two weeks to a real answer

Week one: change nothing

Install it and work as you normally do. At the end of the week, open Analytics and write down three things: the named peak window, the two or three darkest cells on the heatmap, and the hours you know were blocked by meetings. The heatmap covers one week at a time, so paper or a note is the right tool here.

Mark what the calendar did

Compare the heatmap with your calendar for the same week. Any window that sits right after a block of meetings is suspect. Any window that shows up on a day with an open morning is much more interesting, because it is what you did when you had a choice. Light meeting days are the most useful days in your data.

Week two: move the hard thing

Pick the job that needs the most thinking. Schedule it into your candidate window for five days running, and put your mail, chat and admin somewhere else.

Then set a Goal so you can see it. A goal is a daily amount of one category, from 15 minutes to 12 hours, and it fills from the hours actually logged, so a two-hour target on productive apps needs no bookkeeping.

Read the streak, not the total

At the end of week two, open Focus Score and click through the daily bars to each day's breakdown. The component that matters here is the Focus Streak, worth 20 points and full at two unbroken hours. Total productive time will not change much if you only moved work around. A longer longest-run means the window really was better for sustained work.

Then use Reports. Choose Custom and take the fourteen days. The first-half versus second-half comparison sets your two weeks against each other without any spreadsheet work.

What to do with the answer

If the streak grew, you have found something worth defending. Block it in your calendar and keep it for one job. Two hours used well are worth protecting from a recurring meeting, and "I do my deep work from four to six" is an easier request when you have a chart behind it.

If nothing changed, that is useful too. Your bottleneck is probably not the time of day. Open the App Switcher and see what is breaking your runs.

Run the check again after anything that changes your days: a new job, a new baby, a move to another timezone, a season of early sunsets.

What it cannot see

FocusLens times the app in front of you. It cannot see a whiteboard, a walk or a notebook, and hours spent thinking away from the Mac will look empty. Those may be some of your best hours. The chart answers a narrower question, namely when you do your best work at the Mac, and that is the one it can answer honestly.

It answers it without asking for any permission to track and without recording window titles, URLs or document names. FocusLens is free for three days, then $19.99, once. Download it, and you can have your first week's heatmap by next Monday.