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Definitely agree with you that this is very hard and intricate - we are continuously thinking about how to balance between intermediate interventions/reminders and solving the most serious social media addictions.



Just a loose thought. It would be awesome to have a desktop app with minimal settings that would learn your habits and adapt to them. Something that will not block access but assist you with cutting your time spent on unnecessary tasks. Essentially, something that you already build, but without browser extensions and working on all system apps.

Sensing if you spend time on browsing newsfeed or administrating Facebook pages, and distinguish between these different activities. Did you work for the last two hours in VS Code, and now you are browsing newsfeed? IRC? RSS? Anything other than working? In this case, it will automatically switch you over to the last used app, and inform the user about spending too much time using FB or anything other on nonsense. Automatically filtering every system notification, showing you the most important ones. Not using the computer for more than 30 minutes after 6 pm? It will let you do anything you want but notify about other activities, for example, 4 hours on Netflix, and it's almost 12am? Then it will tell you, that for the last four days you slept at that time. And ask if you want to spend more time on those activities or gradually turndown brightness of your screen, and put your computer to sleep... :)


Thanks a lot for all these ideas; can definitely be a great approach. Desktop and mobile are our two biggest directions. It is definitely on our minds to bring functionalities of our extension onto apps on the computer, and be more intelligent on how we intervene people and bring them back to productive work, like the ones you suggested.




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