Hey HN,<p>I've been working on a Chrome/Firefox extension called Intention to help me stay focused and not get distracted, and for me and my friends, we've found it more effective than other tools we've tried.<p>The idea behind it is extremely simple: Commit to a time limit <i></i>before<i></i> using a distracting site.<p>This prevents the two most common ways that we get sucked into distractions online:<p>1. Habitual navigation: Throughout the day, we reflexively type t/f/r <enter> and immediately start scrolling through Twitter / Facebook / Reddit / etc. Intention stops you before you start browsing and gives you the opportunity to decide not to get sucked in.<p>2. Mindless browsing: Our willpower is no match for the endless stream of personalized content optimized to keep our attention for as long as possible. Intention pauses your browsing after your intended time limit and restores your focus.<p>You can set a daily limit to know how much time you've spent across all distracting sites, and for every day you stay under your limit, you'll grow your personal streak.<p>I designed Intention with privacy as a core priority, and here's what that means:<p>- Intention requests access only to the sites you select, not all sites.<p>- Intention gives you full control over the data you share.<p>- Your browsing history stays in your browser and is never transmitted.<p>Intention is part of a suite of tools I'm developing to help people spend their time well, and I'd love to hear your feedback.<p>DK<p>P.S. If you'd like to read about the process behind developing Intention, I've been publicly writing a daily journal at <a href="https://roadtoramen.com" rel="nofollow">https://roadtoramen.com</a>
I love this idea and just installed it. However it falls into a similar problem I have found myself in with iphone's screen time.<p>On my iphone I have found myself mindlessly clicking the "add 15 minutes" of screen time and typing in my 4 digit code so often that it is now just muscle memory to do so. Yes, I have no self control.<p>Could you add a feature so you have to type in a pin to continue BUT the number pad is in a random order, to break up muscle memory? Or randomly re-arrange the add 1,5,15 min buttons? Or a math problem?
Hey this looks really helpful! I appreciate your commitment to privacy, that's a very important feature for me. Nonetheless, having been burned by Chrome extensions in the past [1], I'm worried about privacy and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to make it open source to allay those concerns.<p>[1] <a href="https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extension-steals-your-internet-history/" rel="nofollow">https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio...</a>
I've developed an easy to follow method to stop procrastinating in time "black-hole" sites, like social networks, etc... I've observed that the problem in my case is having the possibility of accessing my account at those sites immediately, as soon as I get bored doing any repetitive task at work, or I have an idea about something I could post in a social network, etc... So the easiest way for me to avoid that is to use a long, very-hard-to-remember password there, write it down in a notepad, and <i>never</i> save the login info in the browser. Bonus measure, you could leave the notepad outside home (in the car f.e.)... that way, losing time procastinating requires actually more effort for me than just stand up for a little and then return to work. The point is never allow that to be an easy option, an easy way to escape from responsibilities... Installed "walls" via browser extensions etc never really worked for me, as in the end I just disable them if I feel that's bothering me. PS. Also of course, avoid to save the cookie session once you close the browser in "dangerous" sites...
This is fantastic :D! Thanks for building this.<p>As a feature request, I would love to be able to restrict my time spent on websites I arrive at _from_ e.g. HackerNews, not just _on_ HackerNews itself.
You should look into Motion. <a href="https://www.inmotion.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inmotion.app/</a>
It is very similar to your product.
Here's a similar one that I build few years back. It forces you to wait specified number of seconds before visiting a website. That way you break the dopamine cycle.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/waitblock/kcnjfeppclpdinikcljfjigoongebpkh?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/waitblock/kcnjfepp...</a>
these last 2 weeks me and my wife created a strict rule where we can't have any screens (laptops, phone, tablets) in a bedroom.<p>now we don't browse while laying in bed in the morning or at night. this simple change cutdown on my addiction even when out of my bed room.<p>When we go to our bedroom at night we know it means bed time, its a mental change.<p>Also, at first you'll feel an urge to look at your phone at night, but it goes away.
To the author: this is AWESOME.<p>I find myself caught in the y/t/f <enter> loop all the time. I use a site blocker, but if I do want to visit a site, I end up turning off the blocker and forgetting to re-enable it. This seems like much a better solution that allows me access to the sites I need, but ensures I don't get lost in them, and tracks my usage.<p>I am seriously so pumped about this, funny that I needed to visit one of my blacklist sites (hacker news) in order to find this. Please keep us posted with updates (settings page of the app?), if I continue to use this I'd be happy to pay for it in the future.<p>One thing I'd love to be able to do right now is whitelist certain times in the middle of the day. For example, lunch. Punching in 30 mins on a site is an easy fix, but it'd be nice if that were built in.
This is awesome! I would also pay for this after I've seen the privacy-aware and clear onboarding!<p>Feature request:<p>"Focus mode"<p>Ability to start a focus session for 30m, 1h, 2h etc. in addition to having the schedule. E.g. by default my schedule allows browsing reddit on the weekend, but if I need to get something done on Sunday I can get click the focus button. Or disable schedule and use it only in focus sessions. For now I can only either change the schedule constantly or disable/enable the extension. A simple "Focus" button would solve those 2 cases.<p>The focus mode could even countdown the focus time with a different colour.<p>This would replace RescueTime for me and I've been a paid user for years.
Shameless plug:
I've a similar chrome extension called Baitblock (<a href="https://baitblock.app" rel="nofollow">https://baitblock.app</a>)<p>- It even offers you summaries of links before you click them where available.<p>- Blocks cookie notices.<p>- Hides Facebook/YouTube feed.<p>- 1st party tracking resistance (deletes cookies on every page load for websites that you're not signed in to)<p>- Website blocking<p>The upcoming version even has in page reader mode so you dont leave the page (video in tweet): <a href="https://twitter.com/BaitblockApp/status/1252623683266494464" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BaitblockApp/status/1252623683266494464</a><p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/baitblock-distraction-blo/gabkpiepfabknggoijbdfhbidkcnlikl" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/baitblock-distract...</a> - for chrome<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/baitblock" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/baitblock</a> - for firefox
This is awesome! My mindless browsing became so bad at one point that I made my own extension that I called "Detour". It automatically redirects you from one site to another, so if I absent-mindedly navigated to Reddit, it'd detour me to my homework to-do list. Never got around to really fleshing it out and building the types of features that would really make it useful like this. Kudos!
This is quite similar to HabitLab <a href="https://habitlab.stanford.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://habitlab.stanford.edu/</a> which also includes a number of other options (such as pausing videos on youtube before playing them, hiding comments and news feeds on Facebook, etc). [Disclaimer: I built HabitLab]
Good job on helping to curb mindless browsing!<p>On this topic, another add-on I have found to be fairly helpful is called "Pluckeye" [1]. At its base level, it simply blocks all images and video from your browser. You can customize it by adding/removing websites from the blacklist, and is fairly robust to occasional cravings by having a delay on changes to the blacklist that allow a website. The only downside is that most websites now look broken, but I've found that I don't really miss being bombarded by the colorful graphics on websites.<p>I think there is significant work to be done on making these tools more widely known, but I'm happy with the progress being made. Good job, again!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.pluckeye.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pluckeye.net/</a>
"Mindless browsing" is just dopamine addiction, happens with phone notifications, porn and many other stimulus, a good video about it at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiE-M1LrZk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiE-M1LrZk</a>
This looks really good, I've been going down the rabbit hole of optimising focus and killing distractions...<p>Is there any chance we could get it to make a rest API call on certain actions? I'd like to change my lights in home assistant as an added visual reinforcement.
I use Youtube for music, so I usually have a tab open for prolonged time. However, I also waste some time on Youtube by randomly opening a tab. Is there any way you plan on handling this use case?
Great Job. I like the simplicity. As time passes you'll be tempted to add features. Be very selective, it's better not to add a feature than to add complexity without real benefits.
I am absolutely hopeless YouTube addict. The first review says you can set breaks compared to other blockers. I have Leechblock setup in a way with dynamic "breaks" I give myself 1,5 hours on YouTube and other blocked sites every 4 hours. Problem is I cheat myself by using the "overwrite feature to give me another 9 minutes again and again. I caught myself just switching to another browser its really really bad. How could this be different?
This looks really interesting. I've found the best way for me to stay focused is to just block sites via my /etc/hosts file. I'll unblock it when I'm done working and then block again at the end of the day so I'm ready to go in the morning.<p>If I mindlessly type youtube.com in and hit a error I immediately realize I did that mindlessly and get back to work. I've been doing this for a while and it has worked every time.
This is great. I wanted to give it 5 stars on the Chrome app store, but apparently I can't due to COVID-19: "Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are pausing the ability to post reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Our primary objective is to help ensure the Chrome Web Store continues to be stable, secure, and works reliably for anyone who depends on it."
This is really great! I love the implementation and the idea of having you actively chose to do something you feel is unproductive.<p>One thing that would be nice to see would be a way to track the referring site - for HN or Reddit it would be easy to go in for a minute, open a ton of tabs, then waste hours. Having the tabs count against the timer for the originating site would help
Pretty cool!<p>Recently I blogged how I make my twitter password really hard to recover through heavy, repeated hashing, which has helped mindless social media browsing<p><a href="https://softwaredoug.com/2020/04/05/kill-your-twitter-addiction.html" rel="nofollow">https://softwaredoug.com/2020/04/05/kill-your-twitter-addict...</a>
This is good. A different approach would be to implement hackernew's noprocrast filters, which I quite like. It's nice to have something meter your usage with gaps rather than allowing you to frequently visit the site and prevent you from meaningfully engaging with something else (and instead revisit the site every 10 minutes for 1 minute).
I used to use Motion but it asks me to login and shit and then doesn't even bother syncing across browsers. Waste of time. And then it slows down web pages and sticks that annoying little box on the side. My user agent has a place for you, in the toolbar. Stop rendering on top of content and then making scroll slow. Ugh.<p>I'll give this a shot.
Love the idea and the execution looks great too!<p>I'm the kind of person who will just keep selecting to view a bit longer so it wouldn't work for me (I need more rigid restrictions on things like Freedom and actual physical locks) but I'm super happy to see new approaches to this kind of thing emerge.
This is great. Definitely the most thoughtful of these kinds of plugins. I downloaded it and my afternoon was more productive for it.<p>I think that it forces me to take a moment to stop and answer the question, "Do you really want to spend time on this?" before continuing is going to be quite powerful.<p>Thanks!
Thank you for making this! I was using StayFocusd until now. The look and feel of Intention feels so much fresher and easier to use. Also, having a lot more flexibility for blocking is a great feature. And of course privacy. Much appreciated.
This is really awesome. I really like how it has you, the user make the final call. I'm hoping long term use of this will make start to catch myself before I even type the url in. Thanks for making this extension!
If i could request one thing, it would be the ability to block a site during the scheduled time outright, and / or add a challenge of typing some awful lorem ipsum or something to unlock it for a short time.
I can't seem to get it working in Firefox. I can click the icon in the top right but it just says I'm on a distracting site it does not launch the popup. Any configuration needed in Firefox?
I've been using something similar but at the router level using DNS, so that it works on all devices and it is not easily circumvented. Reclaiming that wasted time is pretty nice.
This looks great. I just signed up for Freedom to solve this problem because it works across devices. I'll test your extension as well to see if it does the job as effectively.
Too early to say for sure, but this seems to strike the sweet spot as far as nudging me towards my 'intention' without being so onerous that I simply disable it.<p>Thanks a bunch!
I will definitely give this a try. Also found the shout out to Peaceful Cuisine on your homepage amusing given that I have lost hours of time watching that channel.
I found this really useful. Oddly enough I have been using Habit Labs and it's more feature rich but I like this interface - it's clean and in my face.
this extension has helped me save a ton of time on distracting websites -- particularly Hacker News<p>I also love DK's other extention, hidefeed.com, which I use for sites like LinkedIn where i need to go to do work, but don't want to get sucked into the newsfeed.
huh this seems very similar to <a href="https://browsewithintent.com/" rel="nofollow">https://browsewithintent.com/</a> which has been around for a while?