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Comment by Aea | Hacker News Reader

Love the idea of interrupting the "dopamine loop" with a delay vs. simply tracking or restricting usage. I worked on creating a Chrome Extension several years ago for myself and I can't believe I didn't have this (in retrospect) obvious idea. I have a few concerns:

* The UI feels somewhat unpolished for asking me to purchase an annual plan on signup.

* I would prefer a free version that is fully featured for a short trial period that later reverts to a limited (one app) version. I have more than one problem app and it's hard to get a feel right now.

* Can I overlap schedules (i.e. open during lunch and any time during the weekend)?

* How do I set this up for something like YouTube? I have several modes of using this app: 1) mindlessly watching 5-10 minute videos looking for the next one, or 2) setting up a long playlist while I'm working out and treating it as a podcast app. I only want to prevent the former.

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I can relate to this. I created SuperFocus (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/superfocus-stop-sc...) with a similar idea. Dopamine loop is a big problem. I have tried site blockers / SuperFocus which is a feed blocker but there was something missing and have been looking for the magic solution. Just signed up for Clearspace and immediately felt this is it.

Planning to rewrite SuperFocus later this week to do the same on desktop as most of my time spent is on the desktop browser.

Hey this is great and something I started on working myself. Just a note that if you pin the extension on the extension page itself it gives a very, very confusing message of "SuperFocus works on Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

SuperFocus is not yet available for dboceidahklphhjpfbpnicodnbkoiokn."

thought it was a bug before I realised that must be the chrome extension id, but it's quite likely people will first open the extension on this tab as that's where you teach them to pin it

keep up the good work!

- fair enough, for some users they reach us at a point of "I'm wholesale re-arranging my digital life RIGHT NOW" so they'd prefer to subscribe annually at signup and remove all barriers to better digital habits while they're in the mindset of habit change. will give this some thought.

- we've been thinking about experimenting with this model. I personally find it annoying forgetting to unsubscribe to things I only wanted to trial but I understand your use case.

- yes you can do this - quick demo here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W7gU6ZhlA-fiLx0T2j5h9A14rdc...

- hmm, you could alter your youtube session options so that your only options are 45 minutes or longer? this wouldn't explicitly prevent you from shorter sessions, but might cause you to think "wait I don't have 45 minutes right now - forget it". would be curious to hear if that works for you.

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