Focus Bear vs. Centered: Which Productivity Coaching App is Most Helpful?

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Maintaining high productivity throughout the day can be a challenge. In fact, one study showed that employees are only productive for an average of 2 hours and 53 minutes per day. Lifting the amount of productive time is a goal for many people and they often look to productivity apps to help.

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Two such apps are Centered and Focus Bear. Which one is a better fit?

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Focus Bear

A productivity app developed by someone with ADHD, Focus Bear aims to help people who are constantly struggling to focus and be productive. It has a number of useful features.

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Habit Routines

Start leading a more productive lifestyle by setting routines and goals for your morning, evening, and night. If you struggle to maintain a routine, Focus Bear reminds you by taking over the whole device screen.

Tracking Work

If stats motivate you to continue your streak, Focus Bear provides a daily summary of your completed activities and metrics to improve and understand yourself better.

You can go further and use the app to log other activities relevant to you, such as how many pushups you did within a set time. Focus Bear will remember to record your progress journey here as well.

Breaks for Productivity

Unlike most productivity apps that solely focus on getting as much done as possible, Focus Bear comes with an automated timer for breaks. It will alert you every 20 minutes to take a well-deserved break by stretching and doing appropriate exercises to refresh you mentally and physically.

And yes, the alert is not just a push notification. However, you can always choose to postpone a break by five minutes if the situation calls for it.

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Blocks Internet Distractions

Focus Bear understands that the entire internet can be the biggest distraction rather than a couple of websites and domains. So you can choose to allow only certain domains and websites required for your work and block everything else.

Centered

Centered is a productivity app dedicated to increasing and changing your workflow. It uses a handful of impactful features to do that.

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AI-powered Coaches

With a time-focused technique like Pomodoro, Centered records your progress in hours and minutes and uses AI coaches to prevent distractions. The AI will ask if relevant apps or your phone is distracting you or not and recommend taking appropriate actions through a verbal prompt.

Community and Groups

Centered uses gamification with its top leaderboard feature. The app tracks and shows your daily, weekly, and monthly ranking on the leaderboard based on total workflow hours. You can also follow others in the community, join groups and show them support through likes and comments. To foster the feeling of community even further, you can have your webcam on during focus sessions and see other people’s faces while you focus (though you can’t interact with them).

Focus Music

As Centered focuses on improving workflow and productivity, the app includes over 150 hours of custom music that is scientifically designed for you to concentrate faster and stay in the flow longer.

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Analytics and Stats

The app keeps records of the total number of tasks completed, flow time, and sessions within a month or more. It tracks your daily flows in minutes and shows your most and least productive days.

Which App Packs the Best Features?

Centered is a great app to improve and increase your concentration level and amount of work done in a day. It has a low touch approach to blocking distractions, opting to gently warning users rather than immediately blocking them. Focus Bear has a more full-on approach to blocking distractions — there’s no gentle coach telling you that Slack might be distracting, it just immediately blocks any app that isn’t part of your current focus mode. For some people, the gentle approach is more appealing. For others, a heavier duty approach to blocking distractions is preferable. The other way Focus Bear is different is that it blocks distractions on your phone as well and it has the active break and healthy habits features.

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Try out the apps at focusbear.io and centered.app