5 Best Focus-Improving Apps for Students

Inability to maintain focus for prolonged periods has always been a common problem for students. However, it never was as rampant as it is now. The modern world is rife with distractions and seems to be consciously trying to keep us from being productive by bombarding us with emails, social media updates and other forms of immediate gratification, all calling for our immediate attention. It may seem that you have more than enough time to deal with all your tasks, but as the deadlines draw nearer, you realize that you’ve wasted your opportunities, and now there is no way to complete the job without help from an assignment writing service. Fortunately, tech serves not just as a source of distractions – it can help you battle them as well.

LeechBlock

Internet surfing is one of the greatest productivity killers, be it at work or in college. When you are doing something boring, it is all too easy to take a quick look at Reddit or Facebook to check something, only to find yourself compulsively doing the same an hour later. These days it is not even possible to turn off your PC or smartphone to keep yourself from temptation, as you normally need them to study. So how do you protect your focus? Leechblock has an answer. It is a Firefox plugin that allows you to specify websites you want to block off at certain times of day (or limit the time you spend on them so that they automatically block after, let’s say 10 minutes).

StayFocusd

StayFocusd performs mostly the same functions as Leechblock, but for Google Chrome and with a few tweaks. For example, it offers an alternative option – not to block certain websites at certain times, but to limit your access to a few allowed websites for that duration. It is a really good alternative if you only use specific sites in your work and can afford to block the rest of the Internet.

Self Control

Self Control is an OS X app that allows you to set aside “productivity periods” – e.g., you want nothing to distract you for the next 2 hours. Instead of keeping yourself from checking email and surfing websites, you can block incoming and outgoing mail servers and specific websites for these two hours. Once the period started, there is no way to undo it – even if you restart your computer or delete the application. You have no way but to wait out the timer – and hopefully, spend this time productively.

Focus Booster

Pomodoro Technique is popular time management and productivity method, but using a mechanical timer is too much of a hassle for most people in our day and age. Focus Booster solves this problem – it is a simple yet powerful Pomodoro-based timer. The technique, briefly, means that you work in 25-minute periods of energetic activity, followed by a 5-minute break. After four periods, you take a longer break. Focus Booster allows you to do it without manually resetting the timer and bothering with counting periods.

Focus

Focus is yet another website blocker. Its main selling point is its incredible customizability. You can block groups of sites depending on the type of work you do (e.g., if you need social media for research purposes, you can use them but block other distracting sites), block distracting applications like Skype or Steam, configure breaks and various methods of tampering protection and so on.

Lack of focus can turn even the most trivial assignment into a nightmare that eats up dozens of hours. Use these apps and forget you ever had this problem!