BeFocused

A focus timer that lives in the macOS menu bar. Pick a focus length and a break length,
press play. No account, no cloud, no tasks to manage.

Install

Download the DMG from Releases and drag BeFocused to Applications.

The app is ad-hoc signed, so macOS blocks the first launch. Clear the quarantine flag once and it opens from then on:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BeFocused.app

This works even where Privacy settings are locked by policy. See DISTRIBUTION.md for the alternatives, including signing with a Developer ID.

Features

• Countdown in the menu bar, or just the icon if you would rather not watch it
• Focus and break lengths from one minute up, edited without disturbing a running interval
• Start, pause, reset and skip from the popover, the right-click menu, or a global keyboard shortcut
• A system sound when an interval ends, previewed in settings, with separate toggles for focus and break
• Do Not Disturb for the length of every focus interval, off again the moment you pause
• Auto-continue into the next interval, or let each one wait for you
• Launch at login
• Survives sleep: an interval that expires while the Mac is asleep ends on wake and plays its sound, but the next one waits, because you were away

Do Not Disturb

macOS has no public setting for Focus, so BeFocused runs two Shortcuts you make once. In Shortcuts, create a shortcut whose only action is Set Focus, set to Do Not Disturb, Turn On, Until Turned Off, and name it BeFocused On. Make a second one that turns it off, named BeFocused Off.

The Focus tab in Settings reports whether it found them. Everything else in the app works without them.

Build

Needs macOS 14 or later, Xcode 26 and XcodeGen. No package dependencies, so a clone builds offline.

make run      # debug build, launches it in the menu bar
make test     # 54 unit tests
make install  # release build into /Applications
make dmg      # signed disk image in dist/

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml and is not committed. Run make gen after adding files, or open BeFocused.xcodeproj to work in Xcode.

Set SIGN_IDENTITY and TEAM_ID to build with a Developer ID; make notarize submits and staples. Both optional.

Where your data lives

What	Where	Leaves the Mac
Durations, sound, toggles	UserDefaults, com.aliaksei.BeFocused	never
The two Focus shortcuts	your own Shortcuts library	with iCloud, if you sync Shortcuts
Anything else	there is nothing else	—

No analytics, no network calls, no crash reporting.

How it works

The timer stores an end date rather than counting down, so it stays correct across sleep, high load and scheduling delays. The menu bar item keeps one fixed width, because the menu bar re-lays out asynchronously and any resize leaves the popover anchored to the item's old slot, visibly jumping sideways.

Not included

No tasks, statistics, long-break cycles, sync, or user-recordable keyboard shortcuts. The global shortcuts are fixed at ⇧⌘R and ⇧⌘B, which is what dropping the third-party dependency cost.

Licence

MIT