Stop forcing yourself into 90-minute work blocks — sprint at the length your energy allows and track what actually produces your best work.
The standard productivity advice for ADHD is to do 25-minute Pomodoros. Some ADHD brains thrive on 25 minutes. Some need 12. Some hit flow and should not stop at 25 — they should ride it to 50. The ADHD Focus Sprint System does not tell you how long to sprint. It tracks your actual sprint lengths, your energy at the start of each one, and your distraction log, then builds a Focus Score that reflects how well your sprint pattern matches your real cognitive output.
The Sprint Timer runs your current session. The Distraction Log captures what pulled you off-task and when. The Energy Map shows you which energy levels produce your sharpest focus sprints. After a few weeks of entries, the Patterns tab gives you something specific: the sprint length and starting energy level that produce your best work. That is a personalized system, not a productivity template.
Sprint length: why one size stops fitting fast
ADHD brains have variable focus capacity. On a high-energy morning with a task you find genuinely interesting, 12 minutes feels like five. On a low-energy afternoon dealing with something you find boring, 12 minutes feels like 40. The same brain, different conditions, completely different sprint capacity.
The Focus Sprint System does not lock you into a fixed interval. You set the timer based on your honest energy assessment at the start of the session — the Energy Level field asks for a rating so the tool can eventually correlate energy to output. Low energy might mean an 8-minute sprint. High energy might mean a 35-minute one. The sprint length is not the success metric. The output is.
What the tool tracks over time is whether your self-assessed Energy Level at the start of a sprint actually predicts how that sprint goes. Most people find the correlation is surprisingly high — but it takes a few weeks of data to see it clearly.
The Distraction Log: what it tells you that willpower does not
The Distraction Log captures every moment you went off-task during a sprint — what pulled you, when it happened in the sprint, and how long the detour lasted. This data is uncomfortable to collect and extremely valuable to review.
Most ADHD adults assume their distractions are random. They are not. They tend to cluster at specific points in the sprint — often 7 to 10 minutes in, when the initial novelty of starting has worn off and before the momentum of real engagement has built. They also cluster around specific types of triggers: internal (a thought, an anxiety spike, a different task occurring to you) versus external (phone notification, noise, interruption).
Once you know your distraction pattern, you can address it specifically rather than generically. If your distractions are mostly internal and they fire 8 minutes into a sprint, a brief notes-to-self system for capturing the intruding thought without following it is often enough. If they are mostly external notifications, that is an environment problem with a different fix.
Energy Match: the feature that separates this from a timer
The Energy Match tab shows you which energy levels produce which kinds of sprint outcomes. This is where the tool shifts from tracking to insight. Specifically, it helps you answer: what is the minimum energy level at which a sprint is worth attempting for a given type of work?
For cognitively demanding work — writing, analysis, complex problem-solving — most people find they need a 6 or above to produce output worth keeping. For administrative tasks, the threshold is lower, sometimes a 3 or 4. Knowing this means you stop sitting down to write your best work on a 4-energy morning and then concluding you are broken when it does not come. You redirect the 4-energy morning to admin and save the creative work for when conditions support it.
Focus Score: what the composite number is measuring
The Focus Score synthesizes your sprint completion rate, your average distraction frequency, your energy match accuracy, and your daily entry consistency. A high Focus Score does not mean you worked longer. It means your sprint pattern is well-calibrated — you are sprinting at the right length for your energy, completing a healthy proportion of your sprints without major disruption, and logging consistently enough for the pattern to be reliable.
A low Focus Score after a week of trying is not a failure — it is a baseline. The Patterns tab will show you the conditions most correlated with your higher-score sessions and give you something concrete to optimize for. Most people see meaningful improvement in their Focus Score within three weeks of consistent logging, not because they worked harder but because they stopped fighting their own rhythm.
Using the Sprint Log to design a realistic work week
After 30 days of entries, your Sprint Log becomes a realistic picture of how your actual focus capacity distributes across a week. You will see how many high-quality sprints you average per day, which days of the week your focus is sharpest, and whether your focus is declining across the week or staying consistent.
Most creators and freelancers who do this exercise discover they have three to five genuinely sharp focus windows per day — not eight. Designing a work schedule around three to five high-quality windows is both more realistic and more productive than trying to fill every hour. No formulas. No setup. Open it, set a sprint length that matches your energy right now, and find out what your actual focus pattern looks like.
How to use it
- Rate your Energy Level before starting, then hit the Sprint Timer for a session length that matches how you feel right now.
- Log each distraction in the Distraction Log as it happens — note whether it was internal (a thought) or external (an interruption).
- Record your Entries Today count and Mood Score (1-10) to build context for the energy-to-output correlation.
- After each sprint, note whether you hit the output you expected given your starting energy level.
- Review the Energy Map after 2 weeks to find which starting energy levels predict your best sprint outcomes.
Who it's for
- Video editor who loses 90 minutes to startup paralysis — Discovers via the Sprint Log that the first sprint of the day takes three times as long to initiate as any subsequent one. Adds a micro-sprint — a 5-minute warm-up task before the real work — and startup paralysis drops from 45 minutes to under 10.
- Freelance developer with variable daily output — Logs energy levels for three weeks and finds that anything below a 5 produces sprints where they spend more time undoing mistakes than making progress. Stops attempting high-stakes coding on sub-5 mornings. Output quality improves noticeably.
- ADHD student preparing for exams — Uses the Sprint Timer to track study sessions and the Distraction Log to identify that phone notifications account for 70% of distraction events. Switches to airplane mode during sprints. Focus Score jumps from 41 to 76 within a week.
- Podcast producer working from home — Finds via the Energy Map that their best editing sprints happen between 7 and 10 AM at energy levels of 7 or above. Books all editing work before 10 AM and uses afternoons for lower-intensity tasks. Total production time per episode drops by 40 minutes.
Key terms
- Focus sprint
- A variable-length, intentional work session calibrated to your current energy level rather than a fixed interval. The goal is quality of output per session, not duration.
- Energy Match
- The degree of alignment between your self-reported energy level at the start of a sprint and the type of work you attempted. Poor Energy Match produces low-quality output regardless of effort.
- Distraction trigger
- The specific stimulus — internal thought or external interruption — that ends a focus sprint prematurely. Logging triggers turns a vague willpower problem into a specific, fixable pattern.
- Focus Score
- A composite score reflecting sprint completion rate, distraction frequency, energy match accuracy, and logging consistency. Measures how well your sprint system is calibrated to your real capacity.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a replacement for the Pomodoro technique?
It is a replacement for the fixed-interval version of Pomodoro. The core idea — focused work with intention, followed by a break — is the same. What changes is that the sprint length is variable and matched to your real energy level rather than a fixed 25 minutes. For some ADHD brains, 25 minutes is too long. For others in flow, it is too short.
What is a realistic Focus Score to aim for in the first month?
Anything above 50 in your first month represents real progress. The average first-week score for new users tends to land between 30 and 45, mostly because the first week is calibration — you are figuring out how long your sprints should actually be, not yet optimizing them. Most users see a meaningful increase by week three.
How many sprints per day should I plan?
Start with three to four and see how your Focus Score responds. More sprints do not equal more output if later sprints are lower quality. The Sprint Log will tell you whether your focus degrades after a certain number of sessions — a very common pattern for ADHD brains — and you can schedule accordingly.
My distraction rate is high even in short sprints. What does that mean?
Check your energy level and self-care data for the same sessions. High distraction in short sprints often means the environment or physical state is the problem, not the task or the timer. Medication timing, sleep quality, caffeine timing, and ambient noise all appear in the data as distraction-rate correlates for different users.