At a company like Quizlet, where most of our time is spent focused on core initiatives, it can be easy to let experimental ideas fall by the wayside or never even make it into a discussion about team priorities.
But sometimes, small sparks outside of the roadmap can help us find a way forward — or at the very least, give us something valuable that we didn’t know we needed.
This past fall, a Pomodoro Timer became a side project we all kind of fell in love with and it reminded us that that sometimes there’s a lot of value in exploring ideas outside of the set roadmap.
If not for business impact, then just for our own happiness as a team.
The problem space
I’m not a mind readers—and I’m definitely not trying to be—but students have made one thing very clear: staying focused is hard. Between phones that never stop buzzing, group chats that somehow always light up during study time, and the ever-present pressure to be doing all the things, it’s like the universe is running a full-time distraction service made just for them.
A fall 2024 survey of over 1,000 college students found that 52% have trouble concentrating on tasks several times a week or more. In the same study, 51% of students reported feeing overwhelming stress or anxiety on a weekly basis, showing that over half of college students regularly struggle to focus.1
And with +19M college students in the United States, we thought how might we help with time management and focus?
