Recommendation of an app that helps to develop studying skills.

Today, I would like to recommend an application called "Focus timer". This is an app which records the time of your study and helps you avoid getting distracted from using your phone while you study. Before I explain how this app works, I would like to explain why this app is incredibly helpful in developing concentration ability. Nowadays, as more and more people rely on getting information on smartphones, the numbers of people getting addicted to smartphones increase as well. Smartphone addiction has become such a serious problem in recent days, as it produced a word like "Nomophobia" (No-mobile-phone phobia). According to research, about 60% of the world population shows the signs of nomophobia (source: Trendhunter). This application could be one solution to resolve such addiction and also increase no-phone-period when studying as well.

Application name: Focus Timer (Available both on IOS / Andriod)

First screen when you download the app:

How to use Focus timer (Very simple):

- Put your phone facing down to start record the time of your study!

Basic Features of the app:

1. Click on the text "assignment"

2. Write down the name for your goal (ex. assignment)

3. Set your weekly goal (how many hours you attempt to not use phone while you study), if you want to keep record of daily goals only, unable the "set weekly goal" button

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4. You can also create multiple themes of your goals.

5. Once your turn your phone face down to start record the time. It will keep the record of how long you focused without touching your phone.

6. When you are done, simply flip over your phone to pause the time running. If you use your phone while the app is running, the record automatically stops and you will see a screen like this:

7. If you click on the "History", you will get an overall record of your daily, weekly, monthly statistics of how you did on your goal.

8. Lastly, If you slide left from the main page of the app, you will get a screen of how you are doing on your overall themes of today's concentration goal (or no-phone-period).

< Advantages and Disadvantages of this app >

Advantages:

There are several advantages this app has and one of the benefits of this app is that it definitely helps people who have smartphone addiction to stayed focused on their tasks from getting distracted by their smartphones. Once you run this app, you cannot pause the running time, so if you want to get out of the app and use your phone, you have to forcefully close the app. This means that even if you get a message or an alarm from your phone, you won't be able to see the message unless you stop yourself from recording the time. Also, it automatically mutes your phone, so you won't here any alarms from the phone. Furthermore, if you keeps record of your no-mobile-time from seconds to hours, so you can see how often you get distracted which will bring about self motivation to increase the time of your concentration. When I first used the app, I got a record of 11 seconds, so I felt very embarrassed to myself that I get distracted to my phone so quickly. I never realized I was distracted this badly, but now that I can see it myself, i got the motivation to consciously not use my phone. Secondly, the interface of this app is very simple. The only action you need to do to use this app is to flip your phone face down, so it is very easy to use even to the people who are not familiar with smartphones. Thirdly, considering that this is a free app, it is good that there are no distracting advertisements. Usually in free apps, there are advertisements everywhere, but this one did not have any. Also, there is no need to worry about any privacy concerns because you don't need to create an account to use this app. From this, I could tell that this app is very user-centered. Lastly, as this app shows the overall statistics of your daily, weekly, monthly records, you can easily see if you are making improvements or not. This will enable users to set reasonable goals for themselves and give a chance to know how long one can concentrate on a task without getting distracted by the phone.

Disadvantages:

Despite many benefits, I could find few negativity this app has. First, it doesn't lock your phone, so if you continue to run this app for a long time, it will overuse your battery. Second, the measuring method is to restricted. For example, it only works one a flat surface because you have to turn your phone faced down, so if you are studying at a public transportation or any place there is no flat surface, you cannot record the time properly. Thirdly, you can only add the themes up to eight. If you are studying more than eight different subjects, it won't let you keep the record for all the subjects you have. Lastly, if you are studying through phone applications like Duolingo or Cake (Language learning applications), you cannot keep the record. It is the major minority that it only works for offline studies.

However, I believe that it has more benefits than disadvantages so it is an amazing study tool!

Reflection on reviewing this app:

As I was looking through apps that help to build on study skills, I have seen many different apps like Focus time. This alerted me that there are a lot of people who are addicted to smartphones and wish to not get distracted by it. I think it is very ironic that more and more people rely on learning information through technology and mostly via smartphones, but at the same time they also want to stop using smartphones when they actually want to study. At such circumstances, I think this application plays an important role of an arbitrator. To be honest, I only came to know this app today, but I think it is a great tool for people like me who are always on the phone and is addicted to it. I've run a nomophobia test myself, and I resulted in about 60% of mobile phone addiction, so I am planning on using this application from now on. I will use this app and come back with another review of how it actually helps on concentration skills!

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Review of using this tool after I posted this up:

This is the overall record of how many minutes I was able to focus without using a phone while doing the assignment. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to use this app everyday because I wasn't used to using such app so I used it every time I thought of it.

As I have mentioned it above in the review, this app shows the each, daily, weekly, and monthly record of my concentration time. Surprisingly, my concentration time shows an increasing trend. It does not have a straight linear pattern because there were some cases I had to use my phone, but when I wanted to study without the phone, it completely worked.

This app really helped me to concentrate better because whenever I see my phone, the record was like 4 minutes, 5 minutes at first, so it really embarrassed me. To me, it felt like I concentrated for at least half an hour, but the app revealed the truth that I can't stand no more than five minutes without the phone. The embarrassing moment when I have to confront the fact that I am a smartphone addict made me to fall in a denial that I am not. After that, I tried so hard to stay away from the phone. For example, when I wanted to look at the phone, I told myself not to and forced myself to do the assignment instead. Thus, I now surely can say that this app would be very helpful for someone who needs an extrinsic motivation to stop getting distracted by their phones. After I used this app, I recommended to it to my younger sister who is preparing for the KSAT and she said it helped her a lot as well. Overall, the quality time this app give me met the expectations I had on this app before using it. You guys should give it a try!