You keep switching the blocker off. That isn't weakness — it's regulation.

I have paid for more focus apps than I'd like to count, and deleted every one. The install-and-delete cycle had a rhythm I could set a calendar to: two good days, one bad afternoon, then a small private verdict about what the bad afternoon meant about me. Then the app came off the phone, because the app had started keeping the score.

For a long time I read that cycle the way I read everything else: as a fact about my character. It turns out there's now research about it, and the research is on the side of the person deleting the app.

A team at the University of British Columbia interviewed 27 neurodivergent post-secondary students who use distraction blockers (Forest, Freedom, Apple Screen Time) and published the results at CHI 2026, the main conference in human–computer interaction.^[1] Their finding, in their own words: the tools' inflexible designs clash with how these minds actually work, and can deepen "feelings of shame and inadequacy around their ability to be productive."^[2]

One detail is the whole reason I'm writing this. A participant described how the amount of time they could stay focused in an app like Forest became a shameful point of comparison.^[2] Others worried about needing blockers "for the rest of their lives" — about the tool being a crutch rather than a step.^[2]

A tool built to help you focus had become a place where you found out you were behind.

Two honest caveats before I build anything on this. The study is of students, not of forty-somethings with a calendar full of meetings. I'm translating, and I'll say where. And 27 people in interviews is a study that finds patterns worth naming, not one that measures how common they are. That's the right kind of evidence for this claim, and it's still worth knowing its shape.

§1The finding nobody expected

Here's the part that reframed my own behaviour. Some students in the study deliberately switched their blockers off to get at the blocked content: a favourite YouTube clip, a familiar feed. The researchers didn't file this under relapse. They called it digital stimming: leaning on familiar, predictable content to handle cognitive overload and ease the move into a hard task.^[2]

The phrase isn't theirs originally — neurodivergent communities have used "digital stimming" for a while, usually broadly, for any repetitive screen behaviour including doomscrolling. What the study adds is the narrower, more useful version: content you have already chosen and already know, used on purpose to get onto a task. That distinction is the whole difference between an on-ramp and a hole.

Read that again with your own history in mind. The three minutes of a video you've already seen, before you can start the thing you're dreading — that may not be the failure in the session. It may be the on-ramp.

The word familiar is doing the work there. Stimming settles a nervous system through repetition and predictability. A clip you've watched eleven times demands nothing and surprises you with nothing. That is close to the opposite of an algorithmic feed, which is engineered to keep handing you something new. Same phone, same app, two entirely different acts.

And almost no blocker can tell the difference, because almost no blocker was built to believe the difference exists. You get one setting: allowed, or not.

§2Why Pomodoro breaks here: a clock where the finish line should be

Underneath the shame and the crutch anxiety sits a single design decision, and it's so standard that nobody argues about it any more.

Every mainstream focus tool ends your session on a clock. Twenty-five minutes, then a break. It's the Pomodoro shape, and it quietly assumes focus behaves like a light switch: full brightness the moment you press start, steady until the bell.

For a lot of inattentive brains it doesn't behave like that at all. It behaves like a ramp. You start at nothing, climb slowly through a stretch that feels like wading, and somewhere well past the twenty-minute mark the thing finally arrives — hyperfocus, if you want its proper name — and the work stops being a negotiation. The study describes exactly this collision: work rhythms against tool design "rooted in fixed, linear time structures."^[1] Participants noted that reaching real focus can take longer than the standard block allows.^[2]

Which produces the cruellest possible timing. The bell rings closest to the moment you were finally getting somewhere.

Watch the two shapes on the same axis:

Now add the amplifier. Rejection sensitivity is common alongside ADHD, and it converts feedback into judgment at a rate other people don't experience.^[4] So feed that brain a number (minutes focused, trees grown, streak length) and you haven't given it a metric. You've given it a verdict, updated daily.

I have a statistics degree, which mostly taught me one useful thing: a confidently wrong measurement does more damage than no measurement at all. People act on the wrong number. Minutes spent sitting still is a wrong number. It doesn't track whether the work moved.

§3The project-management diagnosis

This is where a decade of running delivery for banks turns out to be relevant, which I did not see coming.

In project management there's a boring, load-bearing idea called exit criteria: before work starts, you write down what has to be true for it to count as finished. Not how long it should take — what must be true. The estimate is a forecast. The exit criteria are the definition. Confusing the two is a rookie error, and it's expensive: a team that stops when the estimate runs out ships whatever exists at that moment and calls it done.

Nobody would run a workstream at Aon that way. And yet:

Every focus app on the market ships you a timebox and calls it a definition of done.

Twenty-five minutes is an estimate wearing the costume of a finish line. That's the whole bug. Not the blocking, not the discipline, not you — the stopping rule.

Once it's framed that way, the fix stops being motivational and becomes clerical. You move the stopping rule from the clock onto the work. The researchers arrive somewhere similar from the design side: they recommend task-based rules over timers: block distractions until a goal is met, such as writing two pages, rather than until an arbitrary interval expires.^[2]

§4Four fixes, no willpower required

These work on paper, in whatever app you already own, or nowhere at all. Run them badly and they still help. That's the test I hold any of this to now.

§5What changed

I still start most sessions with two minutes of something I've already watched. I used to hide that. It's now a line in the plan, and calling it an on-ramp instead of a lapse removed an entire layer of low-grade self-argument I'd been paying for daily.

The sessions themselves are uneven. Some run eleven minutes. Some run long past where a bell would have been, because I hit the ramp and there was nothing to argue with. Both of those are fine now, because the question at the end stopped being did you last long enough and became is the thing done.

If you've deleted a shelf full of focus apps, you weren't failing at them. You were noticing, correctly, that they were measuring the wrong thing and charging you for the gap. Move the finish line onto the work. Most of the shame was living in that one design decision.