Wanted to share Drawers, an app my friend Gonzalo and I (Kieran) have been working on to combat distraction and get people in the flow state. Drawers creates project-scoped workspaces on your Mac, complete with project-specific docks that can contain chats, files, and websites, in addition to apps.
We made Drawers because we were concerned about how distracted we were getting when trying to work on the computer. We believe that many productivity solutions (blocklists, pomodoro) treat distraction as a willpower problem, when it is really a structural problem with modern UIs. Projects live across multiple apps, and each app is used for multiple projects. Getting to work requires collecting a specific set of resources across multiple applications, and staying focused requires ignoring all the noise from other projects within shared applications.
Drawers addresses this by rearranging the UI around projects. Each project gets its own Drawer, with a project-specific dock containing only the resources for that project. Start working on a project and distractions from other projects will be less accessible, while the resources for the current project are already laid out for you.
Drawers is deliberately opinionated, and we are curious to see if this vision resonates with people.
Would love to hear feedback if you try it out!