Practical, honest guides to doing your best cognitive work on a Mac.
Focused knowledge work is getting harder. Notifications, endless tabs and the pull of shallow busywork make it a real skill to start something demanding, stay with it, and protect the thinking time that actually moves your work forward. This section collects what I’ve learned about doing exactly that on the Mac, over nearly thirty years of making software for people who work with their minds.
The guides start from the problem, not the product. Where a paid tool genuinely helps I say so (and I make two of them), but every guide is written to be useful whether or not you buy anything.
Guides
- Time boxing on a Mac: what the technique is, the free and built-in ways to try it, and the dedicated apps built for it. The best place to start.
- Focus apps for ADHD on a Mac: an honest look at why focus is hard with ADHD and what actually helps, from someone who makes focus software (not a clinician).
- Deep work on a Mac: how to protect long, undistracted blocks for your most demanding work, with the free tools and the dedicated apps.
The tools
Two of my apps are built for this kind of work, and they pair naturally:
- Vitamin-R is a focus and time boxing app: it structures your work into short, single-objective sessions, keeps you on track, and turns your effort into visible progress. A one-time purchase, popular with people who have ADHD.
- Burst Notes is a quick-capture notes app: it gets fleeting thoughts out of your head in a few keystrokes, so an intruding idea never has to break your concentration or get lost.
Used together, Vitamin-R governs how you focus and Burst Notes protects your working memory while you do. Both are Mac-native, one-time purchases from publicspace.net, which has made Mac software since 1996.