How Flowo's Focus Screen Works: One Task and One Timer

What the focus screen shows

The focus screen in Flowo has four elements: a task title, a line of time, a countdown circle and a strip of today's schedule. The page has no navigation bar and no task list, and vertical scrolling is switched off so that everything sits in one viewport.

• The title is a single line at 28 points. A long title is cut with an ellipsis.
• The line under it shows the block's planned start and end before a session, and "Started at" with a clock time once the timer runs.
• The circle is 272 points wide. The remaining time is set in tabular figures, so the digits hold their position as the seconds change.
• Three round buttons sit below: skip the phase, start or pause, and stop. The middle one is 68 points across and the outer two are 50.
• Four 44-point buttons in the header close the screen or open statistics, a freestyle session and timer settings.

The schedule strip draws the day's blocks at 2 points per minute and accepts a pinch from 1 to 15 points per minute. A block never draws narrower than 45 points. Narrow blocks show an icon in place of a label, and the narrowest show a dot. After a manual scroll the strip returns to the current time ten seconds later.

How a session starts

A focus session in Flowo starts from the schedule the planner has already built. When the screen opens it loads today's scheduled blocks, sorts them by start time and finds the block whose interval contains the current moment. That block's parent task is loaded into the timer.

The lookup repeats every minute. If the active block changes while the timer is idle, the new task replaces the old one. A running timer is left alone.

Some moments have no task. A gap of one minute or more between two blocks is drawn as a break, and sleep and meal blocks carry their own labels. With an empty schedule the title reads "Flow".

For work that is outside the plan there is a freestyle sheet. It asks what the person is working on, offers 15, 25, 45 or 60 minutes, and lets them choose a single timer or a pomodoro cycle. Flowo then creates a task in a category named Freestyle so that the time has a record to attach to.

The screen opens from the Tools section in Settings and from an external action named start_focus, which selects the Today tab and presents the focus screen full screen.

How the timer keeps running

The countdown runs in a separate Dart isolate that sends one tick per second to a singleton timer service. Because the service outlives the screen, closing the screen does not reset the session. The screen only attaches a listener when it opens and removes it when it closes.

The defaults are 25 minutes of focus, a 5 minute short break and a 15 minute long break after every fourth session. Breaks start automatically by default. The next focus session waits for a tap by default.

The session is mirrored outside the app. On iOS a Live Activity receives the mode, the remaining time and the progress. On Android a foreground service does the same job and keeps the isolate ticking in the background, so on return the service only refreshes the display. The Dart side accepts four commands from the native side: skip, pause, resume and stop.

How a session ends

A focus phase ends when the countdown reaches zero, when the person skips the phase or when they press stop. In the first two cases the session is saved, the statistics record it and the break is prepared. There is no completion dialog.

Stop saves whatever time has elapsed and returns the timer to its full duration. A session shorter than one second is discarded.

The saved record is a task session with a start time, an end time and a localized note that reads "Focus session". Its length is added to the task's running total. Elapsed time is counted from ticks received while the timer is running, so paused minutes are left out.

What the planner does with focus time

Focus time reduces the work Flowo still schedules for a task. The task model computes remaining work as the estimate minus the greater of two numbers: the work confirmed on scheduled blocks and the total recorded by the focus timer.

Taking the greater value avoids counting the same hour twice when a person runs the timer and also confirms the block. On the block side, a completed block counts for its full length and a partial block counts for the minutes reported. Skipped blocks and blocks with no answer count for zero.

Contrast on the gradient

The focus screen sits on a colour gradient, so every text colour is chosen to read against both ends of it. We settled the values by measuring them.

Secondary text uses the primary ink at 85 percent opacity. At 70 percent it measured 4.1 to 1 on the lighter stop of the light theme, which is under the 4.5 to 1 that WCAG level AA asks for body text. At 85 percent it measures 5.3 to 1.

Gap blocks in the schedule strip use the dark surface grey in both themes. The light grey at 30 percent opacity landed at a middle luminance where neither ink colour reached 4.5 to 1.

What is not finished

Two parts of the focus code exist and are not yet connected. We list them so that this description matches the code.

The timer service contains a check for a block that starts within five minutes, and the screen has a banner that says the next task is about to begin. The service is not yet given the day's schedule, so the banner does not appear.

The settings model also carries a strict mode flag that hides the freestyle button. No screen sets that flag today.