Show HN: Focumon – Turn your work into a multiplayer adventure | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Focumon – Turn your work into a multiplayer adventure

focumon.com

89 pointsGodotX23 comments

I was on the eternal quest of searching for a properly gamified productivity app that keeps me motivated throughout the day and in the long term.

After a few months of a fruitless search, I made up my mind and decided to build it myself! I've since launched FocuMon a little over a month ago. Quite a few early users told me it has helped them stay focused, so I'm excited to share it on HN for ya'll to try it out and let me know how I can make it better!

FocuMon is like an idle Pokémon game where you can collect, level up, and evolve cute monsters by being productive! It puts a reward layer on top of your work which helps to give you an initial boost to get into focus; it then gets out of your way once you are in the flow :)

I'm actively developing more features & game modes for FocuMon. It is also a multiplayer-first app where you can adventure together with people from all over the world!

Cheers and thanks for your time! Milton

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Some screenshots or some kind of video explaining it would go a long way to understanding it better.

I've always been curious how these apps that gamify productivity prevent "cheating" - turning it into a gacha game instead of improving productivity

I see these kind of things as a sad commentary on how out of touch our lives have become that we need to invent a false sense of accomplishment to do anything. Imagining some poor office worker bored out their minds from data entry, trying to trick themselves into continuing, 'j-just one more pomadora and i get de magical, bing-bing yah-who! i-i hav only 344444 bingamons left 2 win da prize.' Yeah, gonna say, this is sad as hell. Time to touch grass.

I think it's just the nature of our evolutionary incentive system. Survival is king for evolution, and ensuring survival with incentives is actually fairly simple; make damage feel bad (pain) make hunger/thirst feel bad and fullness feel good, make sex feel good(but not required for it to work), socializing gives good brain buzzes, danger and fear keep us awake and alert, etc.

The relevant one is that success feels good and failure feels bad. However, all of these systems rely on raising or lowering your feelings in response to stimulation. That is inherently short term and works best with very direct feedback and short 'loops'.

Humans are simply terrible at long term success(compared to short term) because it is a process of incentive that lives entirely in the logic part of the mind, with very little animal input. And the people/organizations that reliably achieve long term successes already hijack these short term systems to achieve those successes.

This is just a tool to do that, at the end of the day. Games are designed around that animal system, mega optimized, so it makes sense to use them as a format for a productivity tool.

That's especially important now, because so many large organizations have workers that are completely detached from the final product, making the feedback EVEN WORSE.

There was a time when I thought this sort of gamification might turn out to be a good idea for me to try. Then I realized I have a hard enough time wrestling my brain into a state where I can enjoy games purely for fun in my free time.

This would be immediately labeled a distraction from real work in my mind and would have no effectiveness whatsoever. I'm also not motivated by competitions between teams to achieve various stats for silly rewards. Just show me what needs to be done to make progress on the company's actual goals and let me figure out what I think is the best way for me to help.

unfortunately there's no way to "opt out" of the hell we've created for ourselves so coping mechanisms which make it even slightly bearable are the only thing we can hope for at this point

Love (really love) the name, but how does it work precisely? Wasn't exactly clear after about 60 seconds of skimming, and well, that's as much time as I dare spend before getting back to

...crap what was I supposed to be doing again?

I have my own variant, it's called bank account ;)

While I guess this is said in jest, during covid times I created a (innecessarily) complex excel with all my bank accounts / sources of income with goals etc... and it really did wonders for my focus and motivation.

you should try Kids to Feed. Not only will you be more motivated, you literally won't be able to sleep.

Kids Fed: achievement unlocked.

Moving to next level

Support Kids at college/University

Focumon .... I read as f^©k you man .... Kind of the antithesis of productivity!

Saying no is a great way to improve productivity

This is very nicely made, cool build! Reminds me of Habitica too like @azophy_2 mentioned. Not sure why the comments are so negative.

Unfortunately, the name breaks up info: "foc u, mon!"

reminded me of Habitica.com

make it mobile, please

From the linked website:

“Focus Anywhere

Our web app can be installed on your mobile devices. Focus with friends & keep track of your progress on the go. Boost your productivity no matter where you are!”

I checked their privacy page:

>>Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track ("DNT") feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this privacy notice.<<

Besides of the grey-on-grey, I am aware they probably just copy pasted something. Still, I take them by their word.

I don't want to have business with someone who says things like this

That does feel really weird... "There's no exactly defined standard for how to not track you, so we're just going to track you anyway"

Even worse,

> If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future

"we will track you until there is regulatory obligation not to"

The person who wrote this was terrible at marketing spin. But uh, it's good that they are at least open about it, maybe?

What would not tracking mean? Is tracking whether someone is logged in or not tracking? Should a DNT header from the browser prevent the site from letting people log in? Some browsers send the header automatically. Should anyone using one of those browsers be unable to use the site?

There's also the implied "we know this is essentially a standard and there are documented ways to receive the signal from the 2+ main browsers that everyone uses, because we called it by name"

I too believe it's likely just copypasta because this is everywhere, but until changed it is still their official stance soooo....

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