Day 41: I'm going to finish Intention

product

Okay, I’m going to finish Intention.

It should be pretty clear by now that I’m constantly changing my mind. It’s only been a little over a month since I started writing Road to Ramen, and I went from wanting to finish Intention, deciding that I wouldn’t, reconsidering working on it, and today, deciding that I will finish it. By following my daily journal, you get to see my waffling play out in real time! Yippeeeeee.

I don’t want to start working on Intention again until I’ve shipped Hide Feed and gotten it to a place where I can let it run mostly on its own for a while. I know that once I start working on Intention, I’ll get really deep into it. Because I know that I can easily get sucked in and work on Intention for months without releasing it, I’m going to intentionally (heh) take a very different approach.

I’m going to give myself just one week (from when I start working on it) to release Intention. That means that I’m going to have to limit myself to a small feature set and do it really, really well.

The biggest benefit of Intention is that it lets you commit to a period of browsing before you go to a distracting site and actually stick to it. I’ve already implemented some additional features like setting total daily browsing limits and such in Intention, but I’m going to remove them to keep the feature set as simple as possible.

Here’s what the feature set will include:

  • Add and remove distracting sites
  • Commit to how long you want to browse when visiting a distracting site
  • Intervention when the time is up

I may implement “working hours” (Intention only activating during a set period of time) if I have time, but it’s not a blocker.

When I discovered a bunch of other intervention tools on Day 39, I said that I need to answer the question of why I would work on Intention if I want to make decisions from first principles rather than just being reactive.

Here’s my answer: I want the perfect self-control tool for me.

That was my original motivation for working on Intention and Hide Feed in the first place, and it’s still true today. If I come across a suggestion to artificially increase latency on distracting sites, I want to have a tool that I can try that on.

I also have unique perspectives on building tools like this that aren’t commonly shared by other people working on tools like this. For example, I take great care in user security and privacy by asking only for the bare minimum permissions and not tracking usage data. I know there are others who disagree with the ubiquitous practice of extensions asking for overly broad permissions and harvesting oodles of data.

I’m excited to finish Intention, but first, I gotta finish Hide Feed!