By Aneudy Adames, maker of One Goal · Updated July 23, 2026
A focus session is a timed block of attention, 15 to 90 minutes, with its own page in the app. Free, unlimited, and separate from your daily goal.
Open the focus page (the brain icon), type what you're focusing on, and pick a length between 15 and 90 minutes. Then press and hold to begin, the same hold you use to commit to a goal. The typing matters more than it looks: naming the thing before you start is what turns "I should work" into a specific intention you can actually finish.
Once a session is running, the screen holds what you're working on and a thin ring that drains as the time goes. There are no digits counting down, no ticking, no progress bar filling with urgency. You can glance at it and know roughly where you are without being pulled into watching it. The whole point of a timer is to stop you checking the time.
Lock the phone and the session continues, with the countdown on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. You don't have to leave One Goal open or keep the screen on, and putting the phone face-down is encouraged. If you unlock to check something, the session is right there where you left it.
When the time is up, the app says one thing: "That's a full session. Take a breath." No fanfare, no score. If you need to stop early, hold to end and the session simply ends, with nothing lost and nothing marked against you. Sessions you finish are kept in your history, and sessions you don't are not held over your head.
You can run a session with a goal set, or with no goal at all. They aren't linked and one doesn't unlock the other. Some days the goal is the work and the sessions are how you get through it. Some days there is no goal and you just need one clean 45 minutes. Both are fine, and there is no cap on how many sessions you run in a day.
Nothing. Focus sessions are part of the free app. The one-time $2.99 unlock adds goal history, the month calendar, the weekly velocity view, and ambient soundscapes that keep playing with the screen locked, but the sessions themselves are never behind it.
In the app
Setting up a session takes about five seconds, which is roughly how long you should spend deciding to start.
Running
What you're working on, in plain type, above a ring that tells you where you are without demanding you look.
A focus session is the smallest useful unit of a good day. One goal gives the day a shape; a session gives you the hour to fill it in.
Why one goal works