We’re excited to announce improvements to Focus Mode, designed to help you balance deep work with the realities of complex, interconnected projects.
What’s New
Related Tasks
The biggest change is the addition of intelligent related task discovery. Focus Mode now automatically identifies tasks connected to your current focus task through:
- Project relationships: See other tasks in the same project
- Area relationships: Access tasks in the same area of responsibility
- Context tags: Find tasks with the same context tags (e.g., @home, @office)
These related tasks remain hidden by default to maintain your distraction-free environment but can be revealed with a single click when you need them. This gives you the best of both worlds: deep focus when you need it, and awareness of the bigger picture when appropriate.
Task Interaction Improvements
We’ve made several improvements to how you interact with tasks in Focus Mode:
- Quickly see all your tasks: You will see that “tasks” in “Today’s tasks” is a fast hyperlink to get you to all your tasks
- Refresh button: Update your view with the latest information by clicking the refresh icon (or using
Cmd+R(Mac) /Ctrl+R(Windows/Linux) or F5) - Automatic task visibility (in active timers): If your timer has a related task, it’s now always visible without needing to click “Show Details”
Performance Enhancements
We’ve also made several behind-the-scenes improvements:
- Accurate time calculations: Fixed caching issues that affected task time estimates
- More responsive interface: Tasks now update their “achievable” status correctly without needing to refresh
Why This Matters
These improvements address a fundamental challenge in knowledge work: maintaining focus while dealing with complex, interconnected projects.
Traditional focus techniques often ignore the reality that tasks are rarely isolated. Your most important work usually exists within a web of related activities, and context-switching costs can be high when you need to mentally jump between completely unrelated tasks.
With these enhancements, MakeTimeFlow now helps you:
- Enter deep focus quickly with a clean, distraction-free interface
- Stay in the flow by making related tasks available without leaving Focus Mode
- Adapt to changing priorities with sortable task lists and context awareness
- Build trust in your system with accurate time calculations and responsive updates
How to Use the New Features
- Enter Focus Mode as normal from the timer view or task dashboard
- Start your focused work in the clean, minimal interface
- When you need context, click “Show Related Tasks” to see tasks connected to your current work
- Sort and prioritize related tasks by dragging and dropping
- Click the refresh button anytime you want to update your view
Feel free to learn more about Focus Mode.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on these new features. Our goal is to help you do your best work while respecting your attention and supporting your goals.
Happy focusing!
— The MakeTimeFlow Team