Guide
Setting up Brain Focus
Written for Brain Focus Productivity Timer on Android 9.0 and later. Menu names move between releases and manufacturer skins, so treat the names below as descriptions rather than exact paths.
On this page
1. Before you start
Brain Focus needs Android 9.0 or later. There is no account to create, nothing to activate, and no file to download from anywhere but Google Play. On first launch you will be asked for permissions; the app can run a plain timer without most of them, but app blocking and the quiet-mode options will not work until they are granted. Each request and its reason is set out in the permissions table.
One thing worth knowing up front: this is a mature, largely finished app rather than one in active development — the Play listing shows its last update in June 2020. In practice that means a stable tool with no new features coming. Check on the listing that it is compatible with your device before you build a routine around it.
2. Choosing your durations
Four numbers shape everything else, and they all live in the timer settings:
- Work duration — the focused block. 25 minutes is the classic Pomodoro figure; 52 is the other well-known one.
- Break duration — the short break after each work block. Usually 5 with a 25-minute block, 17 with a 52-minute one.
- Long break duration — the bigger break, typically 15–20 minutes.
- Work sessions before a long break — how many short cycles run before the long one. Four is the usual answer.
If you have no opinion yet, start at 25/5/20/4 and change it after a week. The common mistake is picking a heroic work duration on day one: a 60-minute block you abandon at minute 20 teaches you nothing, while a 25-minute block you finish gives you a completed session and a real number.
There is also a continuous mode, which rolls from one session into the next without waiting for you to press anything. Useful once the rhythm is a habit; distracting before that.
3. Tasks and categories
A session that is not attributed to anything gives you a timer and nothing else. Create a task for the work itself — the thing you would name if someone asked what you did — and put tasks into categories to group them.
Two habits make this worth the effort:
- Keep the task list short. Five or six live tasks are readable at a glance. Thirty are a second job to maintain, and you will stop.
- Name the work, not the intention. “Thesis — chapter 3” tells you something in a month. “Study” does not.
Each task can carry its own settings, so writing at 25 minutes and reading at 50 can coexist without you changing the configuration each time. In the free version the number of categories is capped at three; lifting that cap is one of the Pro features.
4. Running a session
Once a session is running there are four controls, and each can be switched off in settings if you would rather not have the option:
- Pause and resume — for the interruption you cannot refuse.
- Add time — extends the current block when you are mid-thought at the bell. Use it sparingly; a block you always extend is a block that should be longer.
- Skip — jumps to the end of the current work block or break.
- Interruption — records that the session was broken into rather than quietly pretending it was not.
There is also a notification shortly before the end of a work block, so the bell does not arrive as a surprise in the middle of a sentence.
5. Blocking apps during work
In settings you can choose which applications should be unavailable while a work session is running. You tick them in a list; during a session, opening one gets you Brain Focus instead, and at the end of the session they behave normally again.
Be honest with yourself about what this is. It is not a parental control and not a lock: you can always stop the session and open whatever you like. What it removes is the reflex — the unthinking reach for a phone that is already in your hand. For most people that gap between impulse and action is the entire mechanism, and it works precisely because it is not a fight.
Blocking relies on the app being allowed to see which application is in the foreground, so if it appears to do nothing, check that permission first.
6. Muting the phone and dropping Wi-Fi
Two settings go further than blocking:
- Sound off during work — silences the phone for the session and restores the previous state afterwards.
- Wi-Fi off during work — disconnects Wi-Fi for the session and reconnects at the break.
The Wi-Fi option is blunt on purpose and has an obvious side effect: on Wi-Fi-only devices nothing reaches you at all during the block, including things you might want. Turning off the mobile data connection is not something an app is allowed to do, so this only covers Wi-Fi. If you need to stay reachable, block the specific applications instead.
Newer Android releases guard the sound and Wi-Fi switches more tightly than the ones this app was built against, so behaviour here can vary by device. Test it on a real session before relying on it.
7. Notifications, lock screen, widgets
A running session posts a notification with the time remaining and buttons for pause, skip and stop, and it can be shown on the lock screen so the timer is controllable without unlocking. The end of a work block and the end of a break can each have their own sound, their own volume and their own vibration setting, and the screen can be set to wake at the transition.
Set the two sounds to something you can tell apart. It sounds fussy, and then in practice you hear a bell from the next room and know without looking whether the break started or ended.
Home-screen widgets are a Pro feature.
8. Reading the statistics
The statistics screen takes a date range and shows how the time in it split across your tasks: a ring chart with percentages, and underneath a list of task names with hours and minutes against each. You can group by task or by category.
What to do with it:
- Compare a week with the week before rather than staring at today. Daily numbers are noise; weekly ones are a trend.
- Look for the thing that is missing. The useful surprise is usually not that something took too long, but that something you consider a priority has almost no time against it.
- Remember it only counts sessions you ran. This is a record of timed work, not of your day. Work done without starting the timer is invisible to it.
9. What the Pro version adds
The Play listing shows in-app purchases priced at $0.99–$10.00 per item. The developer describes the Pro version as: removing ads, adding home-screen widgets, lifting the three category limit, CSV export and backup.
Backup and CSV export are the two with practical weight. Backup writes your task list and history to a file so a new phone does not mean starting from zero; CSV export gets the numbers into a spreadsheet, which is the only way to do anything the statistics screen does not already do. Everything described elsewhere in this guide works without paying.
Purchases go through Google Play, which is also where refunds and purchase history live — not through this website.
10. When something does not work
The timer stops when the screen goes off
Battery optimisation. Several manufacturers stop background apps aggressively, and a timer is exactly the sort of thing they stop. Allow Brain Focus to run in the background and exclude it from any power-saving mode in Android’s own settings. No app can grant itself that.
App blocking does nothing
The app needs permission to see which application is in the foreground. If that was declined, or was revoked by a system update, blocking silently does nothing. Check it in Android’s app permissions, then test with one obvious app rather than ten.
The Wi-Fi or sound switch has no effect
Later Android versions restricted what an app may change here, more than they were restricted when this app was last updated. On some devices these options simply will not take effect. If that is yours, use app blocking and Do Not Disturb instead — the outcome is much the same.
The statistics look empty or wrong
Only completed timed sessions are recorded. A session you stopped early, or work you did without starting the timer, is not in there. Check the date range at the top of the screen too: it is the single most common cause of an empty chart.
I changed the durations and nothing changed
Per-task settings override the global ones. If a task was configured separately, editing the global numbers will not touch it — edit the task.
11. Turning it off or removing it
Stopping a session releases everything it held: blocked apps, sound and Wi-Fi go back to normal. To remove the app, uninstall it the ordinary way. Its local data goes with it, so export or back up first if the history matters to you. Purchases stay attached to your Google Play account and are restored if you reinstall.
Still stuck?
The FAQ covers what comes up most often. Anything else goes to the developer contact address on the Play listing — include the phone model and the Android version, because on an app of this age the answer very often depends on both.