You don't need another focus app. You need a third space.

A third space is sort of, admittedly, a fancy/pompous way of saying somewhere outside of work or your home. You’ll realize what I’m essentially saying is “you need air.” That’s how important a third space is.

But let me first back it up and walk you through this. Your focus is one of the most precious commodities out there right now, along with your energy. What you pour your focus and energy into compounds and affects yourself, other people, and, directly, the world. And that may sound cliche or corny to you, but……

Everyone’s energy does. No matter how insignificant you may find your value compared to others. Never minimize it. It’s not a minuscule thing to slight.

Think about microorganisms. Individually, they’re invisible and seemingly pointless. But altogether they keep your lungs breathing and your heart beating. Each one is putting out just enough to keep your entire bodily system running.

Your focus and energy work the same way. What you put out into the world every day might feel small in the moment. But it’s never pointless, and as I said, it compounds into something greater that ripples toward everyone else.

Every focused hour, every intentional effort, every thing you create or contribute is part of something larger than you can see from your viewpoint.

And the parasitic tech vampires know this, VERY well. (as you can see, I really don’t like them.) They want to siphon every speck of focus and energy out of you. They are resource vampires, and without your focus and energy, they are non-existent. Fin-i-to, fi-na-ta.

So the real value is you and your outputs, not these apps.

The tech vampires want you to believe that your cure for this loss of focus is to download one of their numerous focus apps, flooding the app stores, and to also pay for yet another app subscription.

I’m here to say, no. Screw that.

We as humans have always possessed the tools and faculties within ourselves to control our focus, where our attention goes, and ultimately our limits.

These natural-born mechanisms within all of us do not and should not be offloaded to an app. This leaves us dependent on these apps, much like they want us to depend on AI to speed up work and offload our creativity. Again, they’re vampires. And all of this becomes a crutch.

And I’m here to tell you, you will never actually use that focus app. In the moment of purchasing and downloading it, you think you’re fixing your focus problem. It’s an illusion, a mirage.

You download apps like Freedom, Opal, and Forest.

Thinking, that by setting these up and giving them permissions in your phone or computer to limit and block, it will fix you. But you only added another tab to manage.

You’re also enhancing the very thing that is breaking your focus. It’s like delivering symptom-patching medicine in the same tray alongside other harmful drugs.

It’s also like,

hiring someone to clean your room and then watching them slide everything under the bed, your laundry, trash, all of it.

Okay, the room might look better. But nothing is actually organized or clean. That is what a focus app does. It hides your tab-filled mind. It does not clean it up for you.

I’m sure you’ve come across the saying, “touch grass, bro".

Well, I’m here to say, actually, do that. Not just touch, but sit on it or, better yet, lie on it.

A third space is any place that isn’t home or work. It’s somewhere you just simply show up to without having to earn your seat there.

Finding a third space, say, in Europe, was not hard for me. I’m an American who currently lives in Istanbul, TR, on the European side, and it’s great. There are plenty of third spaces here. And many were within a 7 to 10-minute walking distance.

This is how I actually healed myself. So I’m speaking from experience.

I would find myself most days getting up, walking to the nearest park or library, whipping out my book, and spending a day training my brain to focus for an hour or two by reading. It was really hard at first, excruciatingly hard.

At first, I kept shuffling around for my phone every five seconds. The deafening silence of the library room was bothersome to my fractured brain at the time, I had too many tabs open in my mind—a tab for instagram, a tab for the chores left undone at home that I need to get back to, a tab for what I’m going to cook, a tab for the Teams meeting coming up, and on and on.

Before I knew it, I had read an odd 3 pages, didn’t catch a thing that I read, closed the book, and had to leave to get to my other tabs. I couldn’t sit in the silence and focus. Plus, the anxiety and weight of my tabs were heavy.

It took persistence, but over time, I improved my focus, and day by day, week by week, the assortment of tabs in my mind started dropping off, like you would exit them in Google Chrome.

So what am I doing exactly to close out my tabs occupying my brain

• Firstly, physical environment change. I forced myself out of my home. Working from home is great at times, until you become a hermit and get too comfortable, which traps you in a loop of home > lazy > depressed > home. Break that. And this is essentially why you need a third space.

• Secondly, pick one task in that environment. It could be anything, reading, writing, but one task only. Remember that.

• Thirdly, cognitive offload. Write down the tabs that are competing for your attention in your brain's operating window. Harvard Researcher Baumeister found that unfinished tasks occupy your mental bandwidth. Writing them down helps you visualize them and make a concrete plan, freeing up your working memory.

Your brain needs what is boring. slow. and deliberate.

By doing this, your mind compartmentalizes one task at a time, without fracturing it, and the extra tabs start to close out.

And once you start controlling where your energy goes, it stops leaking out everywhere else. It compounds, like microorganisms, helping you build into something that keeps your whole system running.

So this week, think of your third space, the kind of place that will help you do a hard reset, and clears away every background tab.

Because just like a computer, the more tabs you have open, the more the computer slows down. Your mind is the same way.

Your third space + boring activity will restart your processing power again. And the best part is there’s no sleazy, annoying subscription required.