FocusThree

Three tasks. One timer. Nothing else.

A focus tool that refuses to grow. Three task slots — not a list, three — and a timer. No accounts, no sync, no notifications begging for attention, no backlog quietly turning into its own source of anxiety. The cap is the feature.

dark	light

Native Windows. The theme follows your system — title bar included — and nothing was configured to make that happen.

⬇ Download FocusThree for Windows

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What you actually download

One .exe, about 153 KB. That is the entire product.

• No installer. Put it anywhere — Desktop, a USB stick, a synced folder. Run it.
• No runtime. No .NET, no Electron, no Visual C++ redistributable, no Java. It links nothing but Windows itself.
• No background service, no auto-start, no updater phoning home.
• Uninstall = delete the file. (And %APPDATA%\FocusThree\ if you want your three tasks gone too.)

For scale: a typical Electron tray timer ships 150–250 MB to do this. This is roughly one thousandth of that, and it opens instantly.

What it does

• Three task slots with checkboxes. Checking one strikes it through and dims it. Text and checked-state survive a restart.
• A focus timer — 10 / 15 / 25-minute presets, Start / Pause / Reset, a large countdown, and three ascending tones when it reaches zero (synthesized by the OS; no audio file ships with the program).
• Follows your system theme, light or dark, and repaints the moment you switch Windows over. --light / --dark force one if you'd rather decide yourself.
• Always on top, optional, one click — so the timer stays visible over whatever you are actually working in.
• Keyboard: Space start/pause · R reset · 1 2 3 jump to a task · T always-on-top.
• Sharp at any DPI, per-monitor aware — it stays crisp when you drag it to a different display.

Privacy

It makes zero network calls. There is no telemetry, no crash reporter, no account, no cloud. Your three tasks live in one text file at %APPDATA%\FocusThree\state.txt — human-readable, yours, and never transmitted. You can verify that claim with any firewall or with Resource Monitor: nothing leaves.

Try before you download

The browser demo is the original single-HTML-file version of the same idea. It runs offline too, and it is MIT licensed — the index.html in this repo. The Windows application is a native rewrite and is a separate, closed-source product.

System requirements

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No other requirements — that is the point.

SmartScreen: the binary is not code-signed yet, so Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" on first run — More info → Run anyway. A signing certificate is on the list; until then, the warning is about the absence of a certificate, not about anything found in the file.

Source

The application's source is not public. This repository is its home for screenshots, releases and documentation. The engineering write-up — why it is one translation unit, why every control is custom-painted, and the startup data-loss bug that silently wiped tasks until it was caught in a screenshot — is available on request, as is the source itself under a commercial arrangement.

Open-source work lives in the sibling repos below; those are MIT and complete.

Licence

The Windows application: proprietary, all rights reserved. The browser demo (index.html): MIT — see LICENSE.

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Built by datumstake. The rest of the set:

gapsmith — resolve a whole class of porting gaps from rules that carry their own proof · ratchet — automation that cannot grade its own work · handle — a logged-in Chrome, nine verbs · pdftext — PDF text extraction in one header file, no dependencies