Day 105: Binging Netflix

product

Yesterday, I climbed into bed at 10pm and thought that maybe I’d watch something on Netflix. I had started a trial in order to support it for Hide Feed, but I hadn’t used it. I opened Netflix, started scrolling, and found the show to watch: The Good Place.

One of my best friends had recommended it before, and one of my housemates had recently bursted into tears after finishing the season finale so I knew that it must be good. I decided to check out the pilot and go to sleep. I clicked play.

Thirteen episodes later, I looked at the time. Holy crap. I had just spent the last five and a half hours binging the entire first season. I felt as if I were emerging from some drug-induced haze. What had happened?

It had just been too easy. The only thing that separated me from another 23 minutes of entertainment was a simple “Next Episode” button that I had reflexively clicked on over and over until I had guzzled five month’s worth of television.

Since I’ve spent hundreds of hours on tools designed to prevent this exact scenario above, I had to ask myself: Why didn’t Intention work?

Well, for one, I hadn’t added Netflix to my list of distracting sites. Since this was my first time watching Netflix on my computer in years, it hadn’t occurred to me to add it as a distracting site beforehand. It hadn’t occurred to me during my binge either. I had been hooked starting from the first episode. And so since I hadn’t requested it, Intention had never intervened.

Exploration #1: Suggestions for distracting sites

Right now, Intention relies on people to decide for themselves which sites they want to add to their distracting sites. This is fine, but it could be helpful to detect and suggest sites as well based on people’s browsing usage.

There are several things that Intention could do differently to prevent missing distracting sites, and I’ll list out various possibilities here:

  • On installation, pre-populate the list of distracting sites with known sites like Netflix

    • I currently suggest sites from a list of globally popular sites, but it’s limited to 5 suggestions and the user needs to opt-in to adding them (rather than removing ones they don’t want)
    • This will miss less popular sites that people might still use without realizing

  • Show automatic reminders after X minutes spent on a particular site

    • A notification could work as a gentle reminder that helps people be mindful about how much time they’ve spent on the current site
    • This would allow adding distracting sites in real-time.

  • Show time spent on all websites

    • I could track how much time people spend on all sites like Web Timer, the extension I built 9 years ago. By showing a list of all the sites they use, people might recognize additional sites that they’d like to add to their list of distracting sites.
    • This would allow adding distracting sites on reflection, not in real-time.

Exploration #2: Multiple limits

One of the reasons why people might not want to add Netflix to their list of distracting sites is because they don’t want to share a common time limit with all the other sites they use. Spending 5 minutes on Twitter is very different from spending 5 minutes on Netflix: With the former, you could get all the information you’d want for a day, but with the latter, you’d get through a quarter of an episode.

Perhaps Intention could support having different limits for different sites or groups of sites. You could have Twitter and Facebook in one group and limit it to 10 minutes a day and have YouTube and Netflix in another group and limit it to 1 hour a day. Your streak would grow as long as you didn’t break any of your limits that day.

This introduces product complexity though, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. The simplicity of having one list of distracting sites and a limit for how much time you want to spend on all of them combined is quite nice.

Exploration #3: Cooldown

Even if Intention had been active on Netflix, it’d be very easy for me to mindlessly click “Unlock” over and over. I’ve gotten some feedback from people who have mentioned that it feels too easy to continue unlocking over and over, and maybe I could make it harder.

  • Forced cooldown

    • This could be a brief pause where when the lock intervenes, it’d take 3 seconds or so for the “Unlock” button to become available. I’m not sure that this is a long enough wait to be effective.

  • Voluntary cooldown

    • At the time of unlocking, people could select “Block site for 5 minutes when time runs out” that would make the site completely inaccessible for 5 minutes after their chosen unlock time. This method sounds like it’d be very effective — when I intend to watch one episode, I could use this option to make sure that I can’t just go on to the next one without having to wait 5 minutes. That seems like a long enough time period where I’d probably come back to my senses.
    • Another alternative to blocking could be randomly increasing the latency for requests to the site so that it becomes quite unpleasant to browse.
    • Should the option be for blocking just that site or all distracting sites?

  • Watch until end of video

    • In order for the voluntary cooldown to be effective, it’d be helpful to have a “Unlock until end of video” option where Intention could detect the length of the video on the current page and automatically set the timer. This is a bit tricky though: What should happen if someone pauses the video? If the timer keeps going, Intention will intervene before the video ends; if the timer is paused, then at what point should it resume? When the video resumes? If they switch tabs to another distracting site, should the timer resume? The really annoying scenario here would be if someone used the voluntary cooldown, unlocked it for the length of the video, then had Intention block the site before they could finish the video.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should occasionally actively engage in mindless activity (e.g. binge Netflix, use my phone a ton) in order to better understand the ways that I can improve these tools. This seems like playing with fire though, because I don’t actually want to get sucked into these behaviors in a lasting way. I’m quite happy with the fact that I normally never watch Netflix or spend much time on my phone.

Even though yesterday’s Netflix binge was a doozy, I’m glad that it’s helping me think of ways to improve Intention!