This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
FocusStack
Easiest way to understand, improve and protect your focus
FocusStack is for people who make things. Start a focus session, name it after your task, pick the project. FocusStack tracks every app and site automatically, blocks what derails you, and nudges you back when you drift. One click launches your whole work setup at once. At the end of the day, you see exactly where your focus went and what each project actually cost you. No cloud. No subscription. It runs on your machine. Pay once, keep it for life.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm the founder of FocusStack.
I built it for myself.
Every morning I sit down with one thing in my head. Ship a feature. Write a proposal. Fix a bug. One task. One intention. I wanted a tool that respected that.
Not a score. Not a report. The work itself.
So this is how my day works now.
I open FocusStack. I start a focus session. I name it after what I'm doing. I pick the project. And I begin.
From that moment, everything is handled. Every app. Every site. Every minute. Tracked quietly, without me lifting a finger.
If I drift, I get nudged back. If I open my tools but forgot to start, I get reminded. If I need to code, one click launches everything. Cursor. GitHub. Terminal. Browser. All of it. Together.
At the end of the day, I don't wonder where the hours went. I know. Per task. Per project. With clarity.
I didn't set out to build another productivity app. I was using separate tools for tracking, blocking, and starting my work. Three tools for one day. That felt wrong. So I built one thing that matched how I actually work.
Two principles guided everything.
Your data stays on your machine. Local first. No cloud. No account. Your day belongs to you.
You pay once. No subscription. Buy it once. Own it for life.
FocusStack is for people who make things. Indie hackers. Freelancers. Founders working alone. People who sit down each day with something real to build.
If that's you, I'd love your honest take.
I'm here all day. Ask me anything. 🙏
How aggressive are the blockings, and can you set different rules per project or session?
The auto app/site tracking + task-naming flow is clean, but this is one of the most crowded segments in productivity software - RescueTime, Toggl Track, Serene, Cold Turkey all compete here. The "nudge back when you drift" feature is the interesting bit - is that pattern detection or rule-based? That's the one thing that could actually carve out real differentiation from the existing tools. What does that look like in practice?
Love that this is built from personal frustration rather than a feature checklist. The "I built it for myself" origin story usually leads to something that actually works. The piece I find most interesting is the automatic tracking - most time tools fail because you have to manually start/stop things and that overhead itself breaks focus. Does the nudge system have any learning to it, or does it work off fixed rules? Curious how it handles the false positives where you legitimately need to switch context.
I’ve tried RescueTime and Rize before and that’s very close to what you’ve build. What made you decide to build another productivity tracker, and what’s the biggest thing users seem to prefer about FocusStack?
Hey FocusStack folks, great work. I have a few questions and requests.
Here's kind of how my days look. I'm usually working on multiple projects at once. And for each project I might have like 3 to 5 Claude Code sessions open at the same time. So for, say, Project A, one session is me doing research, another one I'm running experiments, and a third one I'm actually building something. They're all terminals; they all look identical from the outside, but in my head they're very different threads of the same thing.
And then somewhere in the middle of all that I'll start getting pulled toward Project B because something there needs attention too. And suddenly I've lost the thread on Project A without even realising I drifted.
So I'm genuinely curious: when I have those 5 Claude Code instances all open for Project A, is there a way to tell FocusStack that all of these belong to the same project even though they're technically the same app? Like can I assign individual terminal windows to a project?
And the second thing, when I do start sliding into Project B territory, how does FocusStack actually catch that, given I will be doing that in the terminal itself? And honestly a nudge is a good start, but I know myself well enough to know I'll dismiss it and keep going lol. Is there anything more forceful it can do? Even something like making me click through a "Are you sure you're switching projects?" kind of moment would help. Just enough friction to make it a conscious decision rather than an accidental one.
Would love to know how deep it can actually go here.
About FocusStack on Product Hunt
“Easiest way to understand, improve and protect your focus”
FocusStack was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 21 upvotes and 16 comments, placing #10 on the daily leaderboard. FocusStack is for people who make things. Start a focus session, name it after your task, pick the project. FocusStack tracks every app and site automatically, blocks what derails you, and nudges you back when you drift. One click launches your whole work setup at once. At the end of the day, you see exactly where your focus went and what each project actually cost you. No cloud. No subscription. It runs on your machine. Pay once, keep it for life.
FocusStack was featured in Productivity (655.6k followers), Time Tracking (11.8k followers) and SaaS (43k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 196.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted FocusStack?
FocusStack was hunted by Nishlesh Goel. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how FocusStack stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Nishlesh Goel