Mindful Assistant user guide

Mindful Assistant is a focus companion for people who have bounced off heavier productivity systems. There is no project hierarchy to maintain and nothing to migrate into. Setup takes about three minutes.

1. Set your working shape

Tell the app roughly when your day starts and ends, and how long a focus block should be by default. You are not committing to anything — these values just seed the timer so you are not configuring it every session.

2. Run your first session

Tap Start, and before the timer begins the app asks a single question: what is this block for? One sentence. This intention prompt is the core of the app. A block labelled "finish the pricing section of the proposal" behaves very differently from a block labelled "work".

3. Use the distraction log instead of switching

When a thought arrives mid-session — an email you must send, a thing you must buy — tap the log button and type a few words. The session continues. At the end of the block the app shows the list back to you so nothing is lost. The habit being trained here is capture, do not chase.

4. Take the break the app suggests

Break length adapts to how long you focused and how many blocks you have already completed, rather than defaulting to a fixed five minutes. Long stretches earn longer recovery.

5. Close the day with a reflection

Two questions, about sixty seconds. Over a couple of weeks the reflection log becomes the most useful thing in the app: a plain record of what you actually did, in your own words.

Notifications

The app sends at most three kinds of notification: session end, break end, and an optional evening reflection nudge. Each can be disabled independently in Settings → Notifications.

A note on beta

Mindful Assistant is in beta. Features are still moving, and your data model may change between releases. Export from Settings → Data if you want a copy of your history, and tell us what is not working through the contact page — beta feedback shapes what we build next.

A focus session in Mindful Assistant is a timer with three additions that make it survive a real workday: an intention, a distraction log, and an adaptive break.

Setting an intention

Before the clock starts you write one sentence describing what finishing looks like. Good intentions are concrete and completable inside the block:

• Weak: "work on the report"
• Strong: "draft the three findings in section 2 of the report"

The intention stays visible on the timer screen. When your attention drifts, the answer to "what was I doing?" is already on the display.

Choosing a length

The default is 25 minutes, but the app does not insist on it. Pick the length that matches the work: 15 minutes for admin batches, 50 for writing or code that needs a run-up. Sessions can be extended mid-run in five-minute increments if you are mid-flow when the timer ends — stopping a good session on a schedule is its own kind of interruption.

The distraction log

Tap the log icon and type a handful of words. The timer keeps running; there is no confirmation dialog and no dwell time. At the end of the session you get the list, and each item can be turned into a task for later or dismissed.

Most people log more than they expect in the first week. That number falling is itself a useful signal.

Interruptions you cannot ignore

Use Pause for genuine interruptions — a colleague at your desk, a phone call. Paused time is excluded from your focused total so your statistics stay honest. Use Abandon if the block is genuinely over; the app records it without judgement and asks one question about what pulled you away.

Adaptive breaks

After a session, the suggested break scales with how much you focused and how many blocks you have already completed today. A 50-minute block after three previous blocks earns a longer break than the first 15-minute block of the morning. You can always override the suggestion.

What gets recorded

Each session stores its intention, length, pauses, distractions logged and whether it completed. That history feeds the weekly view, which shows when your focus is actually strongest — often not the hours you assumed.

The evening reflection is two questions and takes about a minute. It exists because most productivity tools are excellent at recording plans and terrible at recording what actually happened.

The two questions

1. 1.What actually mattered today? — one or two lines, in your own words.
2. 2.What will you protect tomorrow? — the single thing that should get a block before anything else takes the space.

That is the whole ritual. There is no rating, no mood scale and no streak pressure.

When it appears

By default the app nudges you at the end of the working hours you set during setup. Change the time or turn the nudge off in Settings → Reflection. Reflections can be written at any time, and you can backfill yesterday if you missed it.

Why two questions and not ten

Long journalling prompts are answered honestly for about four days. Short prompts get answered for months, and a short answer written for months is worth far more than a detailed answer written twice. If you want to write more, the field has no length limit — but the app will never ask you for more than it needs.

Reading it back

The Reflections tab shows your entries as a plain reverse-chronological list, searchable by keyword. The weekly view pairs each day's reflection with the sessions you ran, so you can see the gap between what you planned to protect and what you actually protected. That gap, read once a week, is the most useful output of the app.

Exporting

Settings → Data → Export writes your reflections and session history to a file you keep. Reflections are personal notes; they stay on your device unless you choose to export them.

If reflection keeps slipping

The two most common reasons people stop reflecting are timing and length. If you leave it until you are already in bed, it competes with sleep and loses. Attach it instead to something that already happens at the end of the working day — closing the laptop, the walk home, putting the kettle on — and keep it to two sentences. A short entry you write every day is far more useful than a detailed one you write twice a month.

Reading your reflections back

Once a week, scroll through the last seven entries in one sitting. Do not analyse individual days; look for the phrase that repeats. Most people find the same interruption, the same meeting, or the same time of day showing up again and again, and that repeated line is the thing worth changing. Everything else is noise.

Privacy

Reflections are stored on your device. Nothing is uploaded unless you turn on backup, and you can export or delete the whole history from settings at any time.