Day 39: Should I work on Intention?

product

Today, I learned about three different tools that address the need for defending against distractions:

  • Nudge

    • An extension that places a barrier before accessing sites, hides parts of the page, shows you when you’ve scrolled quite a bit, among other features
    • Found it from Nicole, from the Hacker Fellowship I’m doing, who told me this morning that she uses it

  • Crackbook Revival

    • An extension that adds artificial latency to distracting sites
    • Found it from this popular Hacker News post

  • Motion

After seeing Nudge and Crackbook Revivial, I was thinking that maybe I should spend a week or two polishing Intention and shipping it. There are a lot of people who would benefit from a tool like Intention that helps them spend their time closer to their intentions. I had written in Day 29: RIP Intention about how I’m putting Intention aside because I’m adding time tracking to Hide Feed, but I reversed that decision on Day 36 when I decided to show time saved instead of time spent.

But seeing Motion… wow.

When going to a distracting site, Motion shows this popup that requires you to commit to a time:

Intention works the exact same way:

When using Motion, you see how much time you have left and can set a “focus” for that session (blue bar on right):

Same for Intention (bar on top of page):

Seeing Motion helped me see solutions to some challenges I had with Intention:

  • Showing a popup instead of a completely different screen makes it feel much less like you’re being “blocked”
  • Having a floating status bar is much simpler than adding my own toolbar up top and programmatically shifting all of the page contents down

Seeing Motion made me feel like I have to get Intention out there, but I know that this is purely reactionary. The real questions to answer would be: Why work on Intention instead of just using Motion? What would Intention do differently or better?

There are already a few things that I’d change about Motion / have already implemented differently in Intention (e.g. how time is tracked — Motion unlocks all distracting sites when any of them are unlocked and treats them all as usage of the initially unlocked site whereas Intention handles each site separately), but they feel fairly minor compared to the core functionality shared by both.

I’m tired from not sleeping well last night and I know that I’m not in the best frame of mind to think about this in a clear way, so I’m going to go to bed and ponder this tomorrow.