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 Four Focus Modes
MainQuest offers four 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. Repeat in intervals.
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
Set a custom duration and work until the timer runs out. No intervals, no breaks — just a single focused block.
Best for: When you know exactly how much time you have (a 45-minute lunch break, a 2-hour window before a meeting) and want to use every minute productively.
Breadcrumbs
Log time after the fact. You did the work but forgot to start a timer? Breadcrumbs lets you retroactively record how long you worked.
Best for: Capturing work that happened spontaneously — you got absorbed in a project and only realized afterward that you should have been tracking. Breadcrumbs ensures no effort goes unrecorded.
Flowmodoro
Open-ended work with natural break points. Start the session and work until you naturally feel the need to pause. The break length is proportional to how long you worked.
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
Before starting a focus session, you can optionally link it to a skill. When you do, the time spent in that session is added to the skill's tracked hours.
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 one of the factors that contributes to your leaderboard ranking. Players who consistently log deep work sessions will climb higher on the board.
Quality Over Quantity
The leaderboard rewards consistency in focus sessions, not just raw hours. Logging a 30-minute session every day for a week is more impactful than a single 3.5-hour marathon. Build the daily habit of focused work and your ranking will climb naturally.
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 two key ways:
- 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.
Think of focus sessions as the how and quests as the what. Focus sessions make you productive; quests reward you for it.