Find answers to common questions about AttentionGrid.
AttentionGrid™ is a web application designed to help you focus through a typing challenge. As you type continuously, you earn face panels on 3D geometric shapes, providing a visual representation of your focused time.
The app starts in Simple mode — a clean interface with just the essentials. When you’re ready for more, turn on Expert mode in the settings menu (cog icon) to unlock all advanced features. See “What is Simple mode and Expert mode?” below for details.
Start by choosing a focus topic using the pin icon (top right). This is the text displayed inside your shape. In Expert mode, you can also manage your topics and feelings using the palette icon (painter’s palette, next to the pin). Think about what you want, and more importantly, why you want it.
Then simply start typing in the text box at the bottom. Type continuously for 68 seconds about your chosen topic. If you pause for more than 2 seconds, it means your attention has drifted, so your progress resets and the text is cleared. Don’t worry about typos, the goal is sustained attention, not perfection.
Once you reach 68 seconds, a panel of the shape’s grid gets filled in. Set yourself the target of filling in all the panels of your selected shape!
Choosing a shape: Pick a shape based on how much time you have. For example, the dodecahedron has 12 faces, so takes about 15 minutes to complete. Change shapes using the pentagon icon (top left).
Navigation:
Mobile tips:
Be playful, be light, have fun. There's nothing that needs to be done here. The only intention is fun and enjoyment!
AttentionGrid has two interface modes, controlled by the Expert mode toggle at the top of the settings menu:
Settings you configure in Expert mode — such as Small Text, Double Fill, Show Archived, and Random Pick — stay active when you switch back to Simple mode. Simple mode hides the controls, not the functionality.
The mode is per-device — your phone can be in Simple mode while your laptop is in Expert mode. Your data (topics, completions, etc.) is always preserved regardless of which mode you’re in.
To earn a face panel, you need to type continuously for 68 seconds. The progress fills at milestones:
If you pause for too long (2 seconds), your progress resets. If you’re using an Apple Pencil on iPad, the pause window is a more lenient 3 seconds — see “Can I use an Apple Pencil on iPad instead of typing?” below.
Yes. If you’re on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, you can handwrite your focus text on a lined-paper canvas instead of tapping it out on the software keyboard. The keyboard takes up a lot of screen space on iPad, and for many people handwriting is a more natural way to stay in a focused flow.
Getting started: There is no setting to turn on. Just touch the tip of your Pencil to the notes panel at the bottom of the screen and start writing. The panel automatically switches into Pencil mode, hides the software keyboard, and shows a lined-paper surface under your strokes.
Everything you already know still works:
More lenient pause window: Handwriting has natural pauses — dotting i’s, crossing t’s, lifting the pen to reposition. To account for this, Pencil mode gives you a 3-second inactivity window before a reset, versus 2 seconds for keyboard typing.
Palm rejection: While you’re writing, the app ignores every non-Pencil touch on the screen so resting your palm or pinky on the glass won’t leave stray marks or interrupt your stroke. Once you finish a session and the feedback buttons appear, normal finger taps work again.
Your handwriting is never saved, never converted to text, and never leaves your device. The canvas is wiped clean each time the challenge resets or when you start a new session.
Moving and resizing the panel: While in Pencil mode, the notes panel has a drag handle at the top and a resize grip in the bottom-right corner, so you can position and size it wherever feels most comfortable for your hand. You can use the Pencil itself to drag and resize — you don’t have to swap to a finger.
Exiting Pencil mode: Tap the Exit pencil-only mode button in the corner of the canvas to switch back to the software keyboard at any time. If you don’t have a Pencil, you’ll never see the canvas at all — the keyboard experience is unchanged.
After completing 68 seconds of typing, you'll see three outcome buttons. These let you rate whether your focused typing moved you in the direction of your goal:
The idea is to only keep panels that represent genuinely useful focused attention, making your completed shape more meaningful.
Emotional Scale mode is a guided practice for deliberately climbing up an emotional guidance scale (inspired by Abraham-Hicks). The default scale runs from 1 Joy at the top, through 8 Boredom in the middle, down to 22 Fear at the bottom — but the scale is fully customisable, so you can rename emotions, add or remove notches, and reposition the midpoint line to suit your own emotional vocabulary. The premise: you can't jump from Fear to Joy in one go, but you can reach for the next emotion up — and stack incremental wins until you're somewhere genuinely better.
Where to find it: Tap the happy / sad face button in the top-right bar (between the Palette and Attention text / Pin buttons).
The slider: Drag the circle to choose the emotion you can authentically reach for right now. The current emotion's name is shown beneath the slider. The slider is divided into notches by a horizontal midpoint line: notches above the line are the “positive” half of the scale, notches below are the “negative” half.
Entering the mode: Just opening the panel does not change anything. The first time you actually move the slider, the emotion (e.g. Boredom) becomes your prompt for the next typing challenge — type for 68 seconds about that emotion, what it feels like, where you've felt it before, why it might be a stepping stone. Your existing filled face panels on the current shape are preserved when you drag the slider, so you can keep building the same shape across multiple emotion settings within a single session.
Synonym cycling: Each notch on the scale can carry up to five synonymous words for the same emotion (for example, Joy → Knowledge → Empowerment → Freedom → Love → Appreciation). The slider label and the in-shape text fade gently between synonyms while you stay on a notch, giving you a few different angles on the same emotional space. A small row of dots beneath the in-shape emotion word indicates how many synonyms the current notch has and which one is currently shown. Single-word notches stay static and do not cycle.
Simple Mode vs Expert Mode display:
Climbing (and descending) the scale: Each time you complete a panel and tap a feedback button, the slider nudges itself in the direction your feedback indicates:
First-completion boost: The very first feedback action after you manually engage with the slider treats = as a + — i.e. your first completion always nudges you up the scale, even if you tap equals. This rewards the first step of a fresh climb. Subsequent completions revert to the default behaviour (equals stays put). The boost is re-armed every time you manually drag the slider (since dragging signals a fresh starting point) and on every entry to Emotional Scale mode.
Customising the scale: In the panel's edit mode (pencil icon), you can add or remove notches, edit the synonym words on each notch (up to five per notch, each up to three space-separated words and 30 characters), edit the displayed number on each notch, and drag the midpoint line up or down to a new position between any two adjacent rows. On touch devices, an Add row form sits at the bottom of the panel since hover-to-insert isn't reachable. You can also export your scale to a CSV file or import a CSV to replace the whole scale.
Exiting the mode: The mode persists even after you close the slider panel. To exit, pick a new Focus from the Focus panel (pin icon). That clears the emotion override (and the Expert-mode overlay) and returns to your normal focus text.
Stats note: Because the emotion label takes the place of a focus subject, completions recorded during Emotional Scale mode are attributed differently in each mode:
Climb sessions and the heatmap: Each time you release the slider after a manual drag, a new climb session starts at that emotion. The session tracks your starting emotion, your peak (best) emotion reached, and the emotion you ended on; it closes when you pick a new Focus, drag the slider to start a new climb, or after 24h of inactivity. The Stats panel includes an Emotional Scale heatmap (one row per notch, one column per time bucket) that visualises your climb history three ways: Full climb colours every cell across each session's start → peak → end span; Starts only highlights where you began each climb; Ends only highlights where each climb finished. Cell intensity ramps from dark red (least) through orange to yellow (most), and a colour-sequence legend at the bottom of the panel matches the palette used in the grid.
The bars in the Focus Text panel (tap the pin icon) show how many panels / how much time you've spent on each topic relative to the others. The topic with the most completed panels has a full bar, and other topics show their proportion.
Use these bars to spot imbalances in your attention:
You can filter the stats by time period (Day, Week, Month, or All time) using the buttons at the top of the Focus Text panel.
Topics are broad categories that group your focuses by subject area. Each topic has a name, a short name (shown as a coloured badge), and a colour. The app comes with default topics like Abundance, Growth, Creativity, Relationships, and more, but you can create your own.
Purpose: Topics help you organise your focuses so you can see at a glance which areas of your life you’re focusing on. The coloured buttons at the top of the Focus Text panel let you filter your focuses by topic, and the Stats panel groups your completions by topic colour so you can spot imbalances.
How to use them:
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Feelings are emotional tags you can attach to your focuses. Unlike topics, a focus can have multiple feelings. The app comes with defaults like Worthy, Free, Proud, Loved, and Peaceful, but you can create your own.
Purpose: While topics organise focuses by subject (what you’re focusing on), feelings organise them by emotion (how you want to feel). This lets you approach your focus sessions from an emotional angle — for example, filtering to all focuses tagged “Peaceful” regardless of which topic they belong to.
How they differ from Topics:
How to use them:
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
The Scene Builder lets you compose a scene from Locations, Characters, Items, and a Focus. The idea is to give your imagination a rich foundation - instead of just thinking about a focus in the abstract, you picture where you are, who is there, and what is around you.
How it works:
Scene selections (characters, items) are session-only and are not saved or synced - they’re designed to be composed fresh each time you sit down to focus.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
The Event Sequencer is a timeline view where you arrange scenes as event nodes (circles) on a left-to-right time axis, connected by links to form a story, sequence, or plan.
Each event node displays the same information as the 3D shape: location, focus text, characters, and items — all arranged inside the circle.
How to open it:
Creating events:
Editing events:
Working with events on the shape:
Links and time ordering:
Managing sequences: Use the upward arrow button in the bottom toolbar to switch between sequences, create new ones, or delete existing ones.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Locations let you associate your focuses with physical places. They use a parent-child hierarchy — for example, a parent location “Home” can contain child locations like “Living Room”, “Bedroom”, and “Kitchen”. Focuses are associated with child locations (not parent locations).
Purpose: Locations add a spatial dimension to your focus practice. You might find that certain focuses feel more natural in certain places, or you might want to see which focuses you’ve associated with a particular room or workspace.
How to use them:
Locations can be favourited and archived, just like topics and feelings. Archiving a parent location hides its children when “Show archived” is off. The app comes with 3 default parent locations (Home, Office, Travel) each with a few child locations to get you started.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Characters represent people, pets, or anyone you want in your scene. Create characters to helps make your scene vivid.
Remember this should never be used to attempt to manipulate people - that will only backfire on you. Only ever use it to help generate feelings and frequencies within yourself.
How to use them:
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Items are objects you can add to your scene — anything from a favourite armchair to a cup of coffee, a car, a book, or a beautiful view. They add tangible detail that helps your imagination.
How to use them:
Items can be favourited and archived, just like topics and feelings.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Each feeling has an optional Familiarity rating from 1 to 10. The idea is simple: familiarity with a feeling is everything. If a feeling is novel to you, it’s less likely to show up naturally in your day-to-day experience. Rating your familiarity helps you honestly assess where you stand with each feeling and track how that changes over time.
How to rate familiarity:
In read-only mode, a gradient fill on each feeling row shows your current rating at a glance. Each rating is timestamped, so in a future update you’ll be able to chart how your familiarity with each feeling changes over time.
The Stats panel (tap the bar chart icon, top right) shows a stacked bar chart of your completion activity over time, grouped by topic colour.
How to use it:
Use the Stats panel to track your consistency, spot which topics you’re giving the most attention to, and identify areas that might need more focus.
You can mark any focus as a favourite by tapping the pencil icon in the Focuses panel (pin icon) to enter Edit Focuses mode, then tapping the star icon. Favourited focuses show a small gold star in normal mode.
A Favourites button appears at the end of both the Topics and Feelings filter bars. Tapping it filters the list to only your starred focuses, regardless of topic or feeling. This is useful when you have a large collection of focuses but want quick access to the ones that matter most to you right now.
If Random Text and Random Within Filter are both enabled, the random selection will stay within your favourites when the Favourites filter is active.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
You can archive any focus by tapping the pencil icon in the Focuses panel (pin icon) to enter Edit Focuses mode, then tapping the box icon (next to the star). Archived focuses show a small blue box icon in normal mode.
Archiving is a way to hide focuses you don’t need right now without deleting them. The Show archived toggle in the settings menu controls whether archived focuses are visible:
Importantly, archived focuses still count toward your stats and badge counts regardless of the toggle — archiving only affects visibility, not your history. Archived focuses are also never permanently deleted by the sync system’s cleanup process.
The settings menu (cog icon, top left) contains toggles. The first toggle controls the interface mode:
In Expert mode, additional settings become available. Settings marked with * stay active in Simple mode once enabled — only the toggle is hidden:
No, you can use AttentionGrid without an account. Your progress is saved locally in your browser. However, if you want to sync your progress across multiple devices, you can sign in with your Google account.
AttentionGrid features three categories of shapes:
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon), then turn on the “Multidimensional shapes” toggle.
AttentionGrid includes four multidimensional polytopes (4D, 5D, and 6D shapes) that can be toggled via the “Multidimensional shapes” setting in the settings menu:
These shapes continuously rotate through higher-dimensional space and project down to 3D, creating a mesmerizing "folding in on itself" effect where the shape appears to turn inside out. The face panels warp and distort along with the shape as it rotates.
Multidimensional shapes are enabled by default. You can disable them from the settings menu if you prefer to focus on the classic 3D polyhedra.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Every time you complete a cube (fill all 6 faces), your completed cube is added to a growing Cube Collection — a fractal “cube of cubes” visualization.
The collection builds in 3×3×3 grids: your first 27 completed cubes form a single 3×3×3 cube. After that, each 3×3×3 cube becomes a building block in an even larger 3×3×3 structure, and so on — cubes within cubes within cubes!
What you’ll see:
How to view it: The collection is shown automatically when you complete a cube. You can also view it at any time by tapping the cube icon in the top bar (to the left of the Stats button). This button is only visible when you have the cube shape selected and have completed at least one cube.
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
Spinning Plates is a visualization that shows one spinning plate on a stick for each of your topics, arranged in a grid. The spin speed of each plate reflects how many panels you’ve completed for that topic today.
How it works:
Interaction: Tap a plate to select that topic in your filter bar. Tap the same plate again to close the view and jump straight into a random focus for that topic.
How to view it: Tap the plate icon in the top bar (to the left of the Stats button).
This feature requires Expert mode — enable it in the settings menu (cog icon).
The 3D Mindmap is an experimental visualization that shows your focuses, topics, and feelings as a force-directed 3D graph. It reveals connections between your data in a spatial, interactive way. It’s been released early so I can explore the best way to represent real-world data in 3D — expect it to evolve over time!
What you’ll see:
Interaction: Hover over or click a node to highlight its connections and dim everything else. You can orbit, zoom, and pan to explore the graph from any angle.
How to enable it: The 3D Mindmap is disabled by default. To enable it, open the settings menu (cog icon) and turn on “3D Mindmap”. This makes the network icon appear in the top bar (between Stats and Palette). Tap it to enter the mindmap, and tap it again to return to the normal shape view. The Mindmap is mutually exclusive with Spinning Plates and the Cube Collection.
Click the fullscreen button in the top-left (just to the right of the Shapes button) to expand AttentionGrid to fill your screen. Click it again to exit. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl/⌘ + Ctrl + F also works in most browsers.
Going fullscreen reduces clutter and ensures maximum focus and attention on the task in hand — no tabs, no bookmarks, no other windows peeking through.
For the full effect in Chrome, make sure View → Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen is off, otherwise Chrome keeps its toolbar visible and defeats the purpose.
The button is shown on desktop only.
Yes! AttentionGrid is a Progressive Web App (PWA). On mobile devices, you can add it to your home screen for an app-like experience. See the "Turn a website into an app in Safari on iPhone" section on the Apple support page for instructions.
I am also working on native iOS and Android versions of this app, but my focus at the moment is on the web version so it is accessible on as many devices as possible.
AttentionGrid does not use cookies for tracking or advertising. However, if you sign in with Google, the authentication provider (Supabase) sets a session cookie to keep you logged in. This is a "strictly necessary" cookie that:
The app collects anonymous usage analytics to improve the app, including:
The app never stores the text you type during challenges. For full details, see the Privacy Policy.
AttentionGrid is a focus and attention training tool. It provides a structured way to practice sustained, deliberate thought on topics you choose. Any outcomes beyond improved focus are entirely your own experience and responsibility. The best outcome and measure of success is that you have fun with it!
The 3D shapes are rendered using Three.js, an open-source JavaScript library for creating 3D graphics in the browser. Three.js is released under the MIT license.
The idea of using 68 seconds as the time limit comes from an Abraham-Hicks concept. Abraham says 68 seconds is the time it takes for focused thought to combust into something in physical reality.
The idea of of using Platonic and Archimedean solids and multidimensional polytopes as the grid structure, as well as the 68 second rule as a timed interactive challenge with inactivity resets - is unique to AttentionGrid.
No. AttentionGrid is a personal hobby project, provided as-is with no warranties or guarantees. It is not a substitute for professional advice of any kind. Use it at your own discretion.