Awareness Before Restriction: Why We're Building Focus Companion

LockIn Labs — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:50:36 +0000

As developers, we spend a huge part of our day in the browser.

Documentation, GitHub, ChatGPT, dashboards, email, localhost... and somewhere between all of that, YouTube, Reddit, X, or another distraction finds its way in.

The usual productivity solution is simple:

Block the distraction.

And while that can help, we started wondering if we're skipping an important step.

Do we actually understand what's breaking our focus?

Distraction isn't always spending an hour on YouTube.

Sometimes it's code -> documentation -> ChatGPT -> email -> GitHub -> Azure -> back to code... only to realize you've lost track of what you were originally trying to solve.

Every tool might be work-related, yet your attention is constantly switching contexts.

Blocking websites doesn't really help you understand that.

That's the idea behind something we're building at LockIn Labs: Focus Companion.

Focus Companion takes a simple approach:

Track -> Understand -> Improve

No website blocking. No complicated productivity system.

The idea is to keep things simple: understand where your attention goes, recognize your own patterns, and decide for yourself what you want to change.

That's also one of the reasons we've joined DEV: to share what we're learning while building and to learn how other developers deal with the same challenges.

So I'm curious:

What breaks your focus more while coding: obvious distractions, or constantly switching between work-related tools?

DEV Community: LockIn Labs

Awareness Before Restriction: Why We're Building Focus Companion

Do we actually understand what's breaking our focus?