This is a brief intro on reading your data. Productivity data from FOCI comes in 3 flavors:

  • Emotion records (focus, distraction, flow, calm, stress, fatigue)
  • Emotion analytics (risk of burnout, frustration, procrastination, distractibility, anxiety)
  • Deep work stats (mental performance, tension overload, flow traction, productivity report)
     

“What's measured improves”

― Peter Drucker



The Gap

It’s pretty easy to tell whether your work session has been good or bad.

Notwithstanding that, Productivity Report is undoubtedly one of the hardest metrics in FOCI.

However if you can intuit this data, you will gain the insight to one of the most powerful metrics in FOCI to help you boost your productivity.


In a Nutshell:

  • At the end of each Deep Work Session, we will be able to read into how we work in much finer granularity. With the session report, we can interpret the emotion balance between tense and relaxation, from the side to which the “focus bandwidth” is tilting. 
  • Peak mental performance requires one to be able to balance the sympathetics-parasympathetics - in other words, you need to maintain intricate balance of your tension level. Too much tension, we get frustrated, and too little, we lose attention. Optimal tension level (Yerkes-Dodson) is the key intuition of Productivity Report.
  • You can tell that you are too relaxed to get into deeper focus, when the “focus bandwidth” is tilting upwards to “relaxed”.
  • You can tell that you are too tense to get into deeper focus, when the “focus bandwidth” is tilting downwards to “tense”.

Four canonical patterns

  1.  Attention flutter suggests the presence of Frustrative Loop and/or Burnout Loop.
  2.  Attention flatline suggests the presence of Procrastinative Loop and/or Distractibility Loop and/or a low Self-control reserve.
  3.  Focus falter suggests the set in of Self-control reserve depletion arising from possibly Anxiety Loop and/or Burnout Loop. If halfway through the Deep Work session, we lost optimal tension balance, the “focus bandwidth” would shrink.
  4.  Flow trackway directly mirrors the Flow traction metrics inside Deep Work. With the right tension balance, the “focus bandwidth” would be able to expand until we get into flow state.

To be honest, the Productivity Report can reveal a lot about our working patterns, and help us understand how we focus. But to me and many other FOCI users it is simply about recording our triumph in work. When moments weren't recorded it’s lost! Nothing is more gratifying than having done our best.