🌿 Mentorship & Expert Collaboration

This article restores an important part of FocusZen’s earlier story. As the website evolved, the original version disappeared from the blog, but the collaboration itself has continued.

Since the earlier stages of FocusZen’s development, Professor Anil Markandya, a world-renowned economist and leading expert in environmental economics, sustainable development and natural resource management, has served as a mentor and academic advisor to the FocusZen project.

Professor Markandya was a Scientific Advisor to the European Environment Agency (EEA) and has also served as an advisor to the World Bank, OECD, United Nations and European Commission. In 2007, he was a contributing author to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose contribution was recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize.

His distinguished career has focused on achieving balance between economic growth, human wellbeing and environmental sustainability — values that also lie at the heart of the FocusZen philosophy.

Professor Markandya first became familiar with FocusZen during the development of the FocusZen app. In his feedback, he highlighted the app’s strong potential to enhance productivity, time management and wellbeing, making it particularly valuable for academic communities, students and professionals alike.

This mentorship collaboration with Professor Markandya is not only an honour, but also a confirmation of a shared direction — creating meaningful tools that help people manage their own resources wisely: time, energy and attention, just as his work has long encouraged responsible thinking about the resources of our planet.

From an App to a Growing Ecosystem

The first conversations were about an app. Today, FocusZen has developed into a much broader ecosystem encompassing FocusZen Labs, education, experiments around attention and human–AI collaboration, and FocusZen Code — experimental sonic architecture designed around attention and focus.

One thing, however, has not changed. When questions or doubts about the project arise, I can still turn to Professor Markandya and test my own thinking against the perspective of someone with extensive academic and international experience.

In August 2026, Professor Markandya also explored the musical side of FocusZen Code and showed interest in its development.

For me, this is a particularly meaningful point in the story: someone who first encountered FocusZen as an app project can now observe how the same original idea is evolving in entirely new directions.

Mentorship Is Not Always About Giving Answers

One of the things I have learned over time is that the value of mentorship is not limited to receiving advice. Sometimes, simply having the opportunity to observe how someone with decades of knowledge and experience approaches their work can be equally valuable.

Watching someone’s patience, consistency, way of analysing problems, willingness to ask questions, or ability to calmly identify one detail that needs correcting rather than dismissing an entire idea can become a lesson in itself.

For me, observing a person like this gives me additional strength to keep moving forward.

It is not about copying someone else’s path. It is about seeing that meaningful progress does not have to happen through one enormous breakthrough. More often, it is built through patience, consistency, curiosity, correcting mistakes and a willingness to keep learning.

That is why, after all this time, it feels important to restore this part of the FocusZen story.

What began with showing one app and discussing its potential within an academic environment remains part of the project today — even though FocusZen itself has since evolved almost beyond recognition.