How the Focus Valley world leaderboard works
, updated 18 September 2026
How sparks become a weekly rank, how the top three earn permanent Gems, and what actually puts a row on the board. It also includes the part a marketing page would leave out: a web spark and a desktop spark are not measured the same way even though they share one leaderboard.
A spark is a minute you were there
The unit is one minute. Every sixty seconds of a running work phase adds one spark, and that is the entire scoring rule at the top level.
The word doing the work in that sentence is running. In the desktop app, each tick of the timer first asks the operating system how many seconds have passed since your last keypress or mouse move. If that number is over sixty, the second does not count: no time accrues, no spark is earned, and the timer stops advancing until you touch something. A minute you spent away from the machine cannot become a spark, because the loop that awards sparks never runs during it.
This is the reason the number means anything at all. A leaderboard of elapsed clock time ranks whoever left a tab open longest. Sitting at the top of one of those is not an achievement, it is a screenshot. If you want the long version of why that distinction is the whole product, how it works lays out what the app reads and what it deliberately does not.
The break bonus, and why it exists
Finishing a break adds five sparks in one go. Not starting one. Finishing one, when the break timer runs out on its own.
Five is a deliberate bribe. The break is not the reward at the end of the method, it is part of the method, and it is the first thing people drop when they are behind. Making it worth five minutes of work is the cheapest available way to stop the score from quietly punishing the thing it is supposed to encourage.
Weekends do not score
On Saturday and Sunday the timer behaves identically. It runs, it detects idleness, it alerts, the history records your minutes, and the scoring is frozen. No sparks from work minutes, no break bonus.
This is a product opinion rather than a technical constraint, and you may disagree with it. It exists so that a weekly ranking does not turn into a race about who gives up their weekend. If you work weekends by choice or necessity, that is a real cost of using this scoreboard, and it is fair to hold it against us.
What are Gems, and how do you earn them?
Gems are permanent rewards for finishing in the top three of the weekly Focus Valley leaderboard. First place earns 10 Gems, second earns 6 Gems, and third earns 3 Gems. They are not earned minute by minute like sparks.
Sparks stop counting when Friday ends at Saturday 00:00 UTC. Five minutes later the prizes are awarded automatically, with no claim button or code to enter. The completed podium stays visible over the weekend, and each winner sees a reward message when the timer next receives the result.
You need an account, at least one spark that week, and leaderboard visibility switched on to be eligible. If two users finish with the same number of sparks, a stable account identifier breaks the tie so the order cannot change between the final ranking and the award. Each place can be paid only once per week.
Unlike the weekly spark score, a Gem balance does not reset on Monday. Every prize is added to the Gems already in your account, so the total becomes a permanent record of your weekly podium finishes.
The week, and why it resets on Monday
The week runs Monday to Sunday and the boundary is 00:00 UTC, the same instant for everyone, so nobody gets a longer week by living in a different time zone. If you are in Los Angeles the board flips on Sunday afternoon; in Tokyo it flips on Monday morning. Same moment either way.
The reset is not laziness about storage. A cumulative leaderboard is decided in its first month: after that, everyone who arrives later is playing for eleventh place forever, and the people at the top have no reason to keep working. A weekly wipe makes the maximum possible deficit one week, and makes a bad week over on Monday instead of permanent.
What it takes to appear
- An account. Without one, the timer works fully and keeps score on your device; there is nowhere to send a row to. Sign in later and those sparks are handed over, so nothing earned while signed out is lost.
- At least one spark this week. Rows are per user, per week, and a week you have not focused in has no row.
- A weekday. See above.
- A name. Both the desktop app and the web timer ask for a nickname the first time and use that. Neither invents one from your email address, and your email is never shown on the board.
- Leaderboard visibility left on. It is on by default; turning it off in Settings removes your row and stops the sync, while your sparks keep counting for you.
Reading the board needs none of this. It is public, deliberately: you can look at this week's board signed out, from a browser that has never seen the app.
One board, and both timers write to it
For a while there were two tables, one for the desktop app and one for the free web timer, and only the desktop one was ever written to. Reading that back, the split was hard to defend: it meant an hour focused in a browser tab and an hour focused in the app produced two half-scores instead of one score, and in practice it produced one score and one empty page. Both now write to the same table.
What that means if you use both. One row, one total. Sparks earned in the browser and sparks earned in the app add up rather than competing, and neither client can pull the number down: when they disagree, the higher total wins and the lower one is raised to meet it. That rule is what makes it safe to leave both open at once.
What it does not mean. The two are still not measuring the same thing, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest version of this change. A browser tab cannot ask the operating system whether you are still at the keyboard, so a web spark is a minute the timer was running, while a desktop spark is a minute you were demonstrably there. The desktop number is the stricter one. If that distinction matters to you, the honest reading of the board is that it ranks time-with-the-timer-running, and only the desktop rows can promise more than that. The mechanism is in how it works.
How hard it would be to cheat
Changing a number in the browser is not enough. The server rejects scores for the wrong account or week, totals that go backwards, impossible jumps, increases sent too quickly, and totals that rise faster than one spark per elapsed focus minute.
That blocks the easy version of cheating, such as submitting an invented total from the developer console. It cannot prove that the person in front of the device was doing useful work, and automation that imitates real activity can still defeat idle detection. Gems make fair play matter, so fraudulent scores can be adjusted or removed under the leaderboard rules.
There is also no daily ceiling right now. A limit of 600 sparks a day is written in the configuration file and is not read by any code: two comments in the timer loop say so outright. It may come back; today it is not there, and claiming otherwise would be simpler than checking.
What an empty board is telling you
Focus Valley opened in July 2026. Some weeks the board is short, and neither the page nor this article will pad it: there are no sample rows anywhere in the code, and an empty week says it is empty.
Which is worth knowing before you pick a timer for the competition. A leaderboard is a game mechanic that needs other players, and ours is early. If a busy board is what would keep you coming back, the gamified alternatives include apps with years of head start, and we say so there too. If what you want is a number that only goes up when you actually worked, that part is running today. The web timer is free and needs no account to try.