The Philosophy of Focus

The Three-Thread Limit

The most opinionated decision in Loomline is the focus limit: you can have at most three threads in your Focus column at any time.

This isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a philosophical one.

Why Three

The human mind can genuinely attend to about three things at once. Not seven (that’s short-term memory for digits, not active projects). Not five (that’s a comfortable list, not a focus set). Three.

When you have three things in focus, you can hold all of them in your head simultaneously. You know what each one needs. You can context-switch between them without losing the thread. The moment you add a fourth, something falls out of active awareness and becomes “that thing I should get back to” — which is just a backlog item with guilt attached.

Focus as a Section

In the markdown, Focus is a ## Focus heading. Tasks listed under it appear in the Focus column of the board. When you move a task to Focus from the board, Loomline moves it from its original section into the Focus section in the markdown. When you move it back, it returns to where it came from.

This means Focus isn’t a flag or a tag — it’s a place in your document. You can read your weave top to bottom and see, right there in the text, what you’ve decided matters most right now.

The Nudge, Not the Wall

When you add a fourth task to Focus in the markdown (by typing it directly), Loomline doesn’t prevent it. Instead, it shows a nudge in the status bar: “Focus has 4 threads — board shows 3. Remove 1.”

The board will only display three. The fourth exists in the document but doesn’t appear on the board. This is the app gently telling you: you’ve written more than you can focus on. The fix isn’t in the app — it’s in your thinking. Decide what actually matters, and remove the rest.

Section Origin

When a task moves to Focus, Loomline remembers which section it came from (its “section origin”). This is stored implicitly by cross-referencing the task title with its original location in the document.

When you move a task out of Focus — either back to Backlog or forward to Done — it returns to its origin section. This preserves the organizational structure of your document. A task from ”## Design” that spends time in Focus goes back to ”## Design” when it’s done, not to some generic “Completed” bucket.

Your document’s structure is respected, even when tasks travel.

Focus as Practice

The three-thread limit isn’t about productivity hacking. It’s about honesty.

Most of us carry a mental list of twenty things we “should” be working on. That list creates anxiety without creating progress. The Focus column asks you to be honest: of everything on your plate, what are the three things you will actually advance today?

The answer might be uncomfortable. You might realize that most of your backlog is aspirational, not actionable. That’s the point. Loomline doesn’t help you do more — it helps you see clearly what you’re actually doing.