Looking back: the timeline, the heatmap and reports you can take out of FocusLens

The Today screen is for the day you are in. Most of what FocusLens is good for, though, comes from looking back: at yesterday, at last week, at the pattern across a month you could not see while you were living it. FocusLens has four places for that, and they answer different questions.

The Timeline: what happened, in order

The Timeline is the raw record. Pick any day and it lists every session in order: the app, a category badge, the start and end times and the duration. Beside the list sit the day's totals and its category split.

It is the view to use when a number elsewhere surprises you. If yesterday's focus score was lower than it felt, the Timeline shows you why, session by session: the morning that turned out to be forty minutes of real work between short visits to mail, or the afternoon block badged as neutral because your writing tool was misfiled.

Two filters keep it readable. Anything under five seconds is never recorded at all, because flicking through three apps to find a window is noise, not activity. And the Timeline hides sessions under ten seconds. If you want a different floor, Settings has a minimum session length slider.

Applications: one app at a time

The Applications view turns the same data around. On the left, every app FocusLens has tracked, with its category and session count. Select one and the right side fills in with that app's story: total time, number of sessions, average and longest session, a daily usage chart, its busiest day, and a session-length distribution.

The distribution is the underrated part. Two apps with the same total time can have completely different shapes. An editor where most sessions run forty-five minutes is a tool you work in. A chat app with three hundred sessions averaging forty seconds is a tool that interrupts you. The totals hide that; the distribution shows it.

Analytics: the shape of a week

Analytics is the pattern view. Its centrepiece is a heatmap of the last seven days by hour, which shows at a glance when in the day you actually do focused work. Beside it, a donut chart splits your time by category, and an hourly productivity chart calls out your peak focus window.

That window is the single most actionable thing FocusLens tells most people. The screenshot on the FocusLens page shows a peak between six and eight in the evening, with 87 percent of tracked time productive. Whatever your window is, it is the stretch of the day most worth protecting from meetings and notifications, and the Today screen's coaching insight names it so you see it daily rather than only when you open Analytics.

Every chart answers on hover, so the exact figure for a particular hour is always one pointer movement away.

Reports: a written summary you can send

Reports is the view built for leaving the app. Choose a weekly or monthly report, or a custom date range, and FocusLens writes it up: a summary in sentences, an average score ring, deep work, switches, average score and active days, coaching tips, and the score history for the period. It also compares the first half of the range with the second, so you can see whether a change you made mid-month actually moved anything.

Then export it:

• PDF, to send to a manager, a coach, or your own archive.
• CSV, to take somewhere that does its own arithmetic: a spreadsheet, a notebook, a script.

CSV is also the best way to report a problem with the numbers. If a figure for a particular app on a particular day looks wrong, exporting that day makes the issue obvious to us and to you.

Keeping it, and clearing it

Everything these views draw on lives in FocusLens's own storage on your Mac, plus a container shared with the widget so it can show today's summary without the app running. FocusLens makes no network requests at all, so none of it is synced or backed up anywhere by us; it is covered by whatever backup and encryption you already use for your Mac.

When you want it gone, Settings has a Clear Data button that empties everything the app has recorded, after asking. Deleting the app removes the rest.

A weekly habit that takes five minutes

1. On Friday, open Reports and read the weekly summary.
2. Look at the first-half against second-half comparison. Did anything change?
3. Open Analytics and check that your peak window has not moved.
4. Pick one app from the App Switcher's worst offenders and look it up in Applications. Is its session shape what you expected?
5. Adjust one thing for next week, and if it is a number, make it a goal.

FocusLens is free and available as a preview by email while the release build is notarized.