Day 57: Wall Time vs. Active Time
Imagine you’re a user of the h0t f1r3 browser extension taking the world by storm, Intention.
You’ve added Reddit as a distracting site that you’d like to spend less time on, so when you visit reddit.com, you see the following screen:
You click “Unlock for 5 minutes”, and the timer starts counting down:
But then you remember that you have to ask your friend about dinner plans, so you open Messenger in a new tab. After chatting with your friend for 10 minutes, you return to your Reddit tab. What do you expect to see?
Option 1: Reddit is locked
Reasoning: It’s been over 5 minutes since you clicked “Unlock for 5 minutes”, so distracting sites should be locked.
Option 2: Reddit is unlocked
Reasoning: You only spent a few seconds on Reddit, so you should still have plenty of time remaining of the 5 minutes you unlocked.
If you chose option 1, you think unlocks should work using wall time, the amount of real time that has elapsed.
If you chose option 2, you think unlocks should work using active time, the amount of time actively spent on the site.
Intention currently uses wall time for unlocking sites, but I’ve gotten feedback from people that they think active time makes more sense. I’m leaning toward switching to active time because it also matches what people see in their “time spent” stats (which uses active time).
Wall time is attractive because it’s super simple, but to implement and also for users to understand. After X minutes of real time, all your distracting sites lock regardless of how you spent those X minutes.
Active time introduces many more cases to consider. For example, if you unlock Reddit for 5 minutes and then put your computer to sleep for 8 hours before your time is up, should Reddit still be unlocked when you open your computer again?
Although a simple implementation would keep Reddit unlocked, I don’t think that makes sense because your context has changed significantly.
There are a bunch of other cases along these lines where it’s not entirely clear what the right call would be. Should the timer reset if the user closes all tabs containing distracting sites? After how many minutes of inactivity should the timer reset?
Typing this out makes me want to just stick with wall time due to its simplicity, but the people who have requested active time do have a point: It is a bit strange to see the timer running out when you’re not on a distracting site. I can also see how it might be confusing to have “time spent” differ from the time that you’ve unlocked for.
Okay, I’ll spend some time today trying to get active time working and see how it feels. I want to create a seamless experience where everything just works and users don’t have to try to reverse engineer how the timer works. Hope I can figure it out!