Jamie Okafor

Editor of Focus Work Remote

About

Freelance web developer, Portland, Oregon. Went fully remote in March 2020.

For the first year and a half it was genuinely fine. Then the context-switch overhead started eating the deep work. Focus blocks that ran six hours reliably in an office compressed to four, then to three, then to "two good hours if I kept the phone in the bedroom and turned off every notification." Standard advice — Pomodoro, time blocking, inbox zero — produced standard, temporary results. The underlying problem didn't move.

Two missed client deadlines in January 2023. Same month. The second one was a React project for a client I'd been working with for two years; I told them it was a family emergency. It wasn't. I just couldn't sustain the focus depth the final sprint needed, and I ran out of time. That was the thing that made me stop treating this as an adaptation problem and start treating it as something that needed actual debugging.

I started testing focus supplements the same way I'd approach a persistent production issue: one variable at a time, documented, tested in the kind of work conditions that actually stress the system. Not on a Wednesday with nothing due. On the Fridays with a client review the next morning. The tracking notes from those experiments are what became this site.

One product I ran for six weeks that I genuinely expected to work produced nothing I could detect by week four. Kept logging anyway. Still nothing by week six. Discontinued. That one's documented too — because the expensive failures are more useful than the wins you'd expect.

Not a doctor. No neuroscience background. No affiliation with any supplement company. I check ingredient transparency and third-party testing records before trying anything. Please talk to your own doctor before adding anything brain or CNS related to your routine — especially if your health history is relevant here.

Posts by Jamie Okafor

Disclosure

Some links here are affiliate links. Buy through one, I earn a small commission — your price stays the same. The commission doesn't influence what gets covered. The products that didn't help are documented here too, because hiding the failures would make the rest of the data less trustworthy.