Ian’s Awesome Counter

Ian's Awesome Counter is a utility designed to help you be more focused and aware of yourself.

My son, Ian, can sometimes have difficulty with regulation and management of his attention. We’ve tried several different strategies for helping him with this. One of the strategies that we found most successful was giving him regular prompts throughout the day and ask whether he thought he was on task and staying focused.

Initially this took the form of a repeating countdown timer and a hand clicker, but after a while this became rather onerous to keep up with, so instead he and I worked together to design an Apple Watch app that would make this easier to do.

The result is this app. You configure how often you want to be prompted, when the prompts should begin and end each day, and what your goal for successful periods is. Then Ian’s Awesome Counter does the rest.

If you turn on notifications you’ll get an alert at the end of every period asking how you did and the values are recorded in the app. You can see your last week’s performance in the History view.

This app is provided completely free of charge. I’ve found it really helpful for my family and my hope is that by sharing it, other families will find similar help from it. It can be worn either by the person working on their focus or by a parent/carer who can then relay the prompts.