Focus Sessions
Deep work, tracked and gamified.
What Are Focus Sessions?
Focus sessions are MainQuest's built-in deep work tracker. Instead of relying on an external timer app, you can start a focus session directly within MainQuest and have the time automatically recorded toward your productivity stats.
Focus time contributes to your leaderboard ranking and can be linked to specific skills for hour tracking. This gives you a clear picture of how much deep work you are putting into different areas of growth.
The Five Focus Modes
MainQuest offers five distinct focus modes, each designed for a different working style and situation.
Pomodoro
The classic technique: 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break, by default. Choose from preset work/break lengths and a cycle count — on web that's 15–45-minute work blocks with 5/10/15-minute breaks and 2 to unlimited cycles; on mobile, three ready-made ratios (30/15, 15/5, 25/5).
Best for: Tasks that require sustained concentration but where mental fatigue builds quickly. The forced breaks prevent cognitive overload and help you maintain quality across longer work sessions.
Timer
Pick a preset block — 5, 15, 25, 45, 60, or 90 minutes — and work until the timer runs out. No intervals, no breaks — just a single focused block, with a "tap when distracted" counter to log how often you drifted. (Labeled "Default" on mobile, "Timer" on web — same mode.)
Best for: When you know roughly how much time you have (a 45-minute lunch break, a 90-minute deep block) and want to use every minute productively. On mobile, Deep Focus can also block distracting apps for the duration — deliberately worth no extra reward, so the incentive stays honest.
Breadcrumbs
Small, real-time blocks. Work in 5- or 10-minute increments and tick each one off as you complete it — a quick hit of progress to build momentum when starting feels hard.
Best for: Getting started on something you have been avoiding. Small, checkable wins make the first few minutes easier than staring down one long block.
Infinite
A plain stopwatch. No target duration, no breaks — it just counts up until you stop it.
Best for: When you do not want to think about time at all, not even a Flowmodoro-style break budget — just start working and stop whenever you are done.
Flowmodoro
Open-ended work that earns you break time. Work for as long as you like; you earn a fraction of that time back as a break — 1/3 by default (you can choose 1/2, 1/3, or 1/5) — banked for later, capped at an hour.
Best for: Creative work, coding, writing — any task where interruptions kill momentum. Flowmodoro respects your natural rhythm instead of imposing arbitrary 25-minute blocks.
Linking Sessions to Skills
There's no skill picker inside the focus setup itself — the skill is inherited from where you start. Launch the session from a skill's own card on the Skills screen, or focus on a quest or habit that already has a skill linked, and the session's full duration lands on that skill's tracked hours automatically.
This creates a detailed log of how you invest your deep work time. Over weeks and months, you can see exactly how many hours you have poured into programming, writing, music practice, language learning, or any other skill you are developing.
Learn more about skills and hour tracking in the Skills guide.
Focus Time & the Leaderboard
Focus session time is the only input to the Focus leaderboard ranking — not XP, not level, not streaks. Players who log more deep work climb higher on the board.
It's a Raw Total
The focus leaderboard sums your raw focus seconds for the period (weekly, monthly, or all-time) and ranks by the highest total — there is no separate bonus for spreading sessions across more days. A 30-minute session every day for a week and a single 3.5-hour session add up to the same total; the daily habit still tends to win in practice simply because it's easier to sustain than one long marathon.
Do Focus Sessions Earn XP?
Focus sessions do not directly award XP. XP is earned by completing quests. However, focus sessions complement the quest system in more ways than one:
- They help you complete quests faster. Using a focus session while working on a quest keeps you on task and productive.
- They build your skill portfolio. Linked focus sessions track hours toward skills, creating a record of your expertise growth.
- They raise your pet. Each session feeds your companion, and focus minutes are the only thing that grows its Level — the track that eventually triggers its evolution.
Think of focus sessions as the how and quests as the what. Focus sessions make you productive; quests reward you for it.