Just Focus: Simple website blocker for Chrome 🙅💻

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Maker

Hey PH 👋 Focusing is hard!! Over the past week, Darshil, Maas, and I hacked together this dead-simple (completely free) chrome extension. Simply add a distracting website to your "Block List" and hit "Start Focusing" - you'll spend less time scrolling down social media feeds and more time getting work done. We found alternatives to be too bulky for our taste. We hope you will appreciate the simplicity and ease of use of our app. Let us know what you think! 😄 Also, shared some thoughts on https://hackernoon.com/the-best-...

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6yr ago

Dilan Dane 🎈

System2

Maybe you can add a competitive element to this as a reward mechanism. It's hard to enforce discipline without reward.

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6yr ago

Jordan Gonen

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Maker

@dilan Yeah, I think that's a good idea. We've been experimenting with a few gamification ideas...would be curious to hear if you had any you'd like to see :)

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6yr ago

Paul Danyliuk

Roast My Job Application

Nice! Just what I needed. I hope this extension doesn't track my data? Please give more insight into what kind of analytics you collect. Thanks.

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6yr ago

Maas Lalani

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Maker

@paul_danyliuk We don't track anything. All the extension does checks whether the current URL matches any one of the sites you blocked (it's all kept locally). Hope that helps! :)

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6yr ago

Paul Danyliuk

Roast My Job Application

@maaslalaniii Thanks for the confirmation! Yep, superb extension. I love the minimalism and the just-works-iness of it, and the inspirational quotes are a very lovely touch. I actually thought of doing something like that myself, although not in an extension style, but as a local HTTP server (and then I would just redirect traffic from specified domains to localhost using the `hosts` file…) This said, what I'd love, perhaps, is the possibility to make it harder to disable. Or at least some persuasion to keep the focus mode on. Because if I feel the sudden urge to go to facebook, it's just an extra click of a button away.

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6yr ago

Maas Lalani

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Maker

@paul_danyliuk Yep! Great ideas! Currently we were brainstorming about having 3-5 confirmations boxes (each with funny messages) before you could disable the blocker, or maybe you have to solve a math problem to disable it. One issue that may arise is that we may see more uninstalls as uninstalling an extension is just 2 clicks away. Any ideas / thoughts? Btw, huge fan of threedo.app! :)

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6yr ago

Paul Danyliuk

Roast My Job Application

@maaslalaniii Ha, thanks! 😅 Hopefully Just Focus helps me keep building the app, lol. I would be very careful with confirmation boxes or funny messages — it’s very hard to get the wording right so that you don’t appear patronizing. Here’s what I mean: Google Fit notifications after redesign — the tone is almost insulting, reminding me of this piece (until 0:20). Point is, funny messages can come along as annoying, so I would tread carefully there. Besides, that’s something that people will soon learn to mindlessly discard. I think your best friend here is guilt. Personally, when I turn off that extension to check on FB/reddit/slack/mail/PH, the only thing I’m thinking of is getting my fix of instant gratification (e.g. checking if there are new messages), even though I’m trying to justify it as, "this is part of work, you need to reply those people, it’s just as important as the coding you were doing moments ago blah blah". What I need in these moments is a reminder that what I’m doing right now is important to finish first, and everything else can wait. So what I’d probably do is a quick prompt with a question "Have you finished the important work you were focused on?" and ask a user to check a checkbox "I have." Or perhaps even type the words themselves. I don’t think people will uninstall the extension. Uninstalling means defeat — no one wants to admit that. And if they do, you can tell them that 😀 People can also temporarily disable the extension, but as a person who does that often with various VPN and digital signing extensions, I must say that’s a pain in the arse to do that repeatedly. Hope this helps!

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6yr ago

Paul Danyliuk

Roast My Job Application

@maaslalaniii Besides, since it’s a free extension and you are not doing any data collection, publishing the source code could be a great gesture. This will also allow you to keep the extension minimal and let people who need more fork it and code the rest.

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6yr ago

Just Focus

Simple website blocker for Chrome 🙅💻

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