Day 92: Prioritizing is hard

I had this exchange in a group message today:

It’s difficult to know what to prioritize right now.

In terms of product, I think the most important development would be to create a mobile version of Intention. Shoot, it’s already been two and a half weeks since I wrote that!

Since then, I’ve just been working on the groups feature which honestly may have been a distraction more than anything. I’m glad to have gotten experience working with Firebase, but adding a social component to Intention on desktop may not have been the best use of my time. But then again, I could be wrong about that, too — when I worked on the very first version of Intention back in October, I required people to put in an intention in order to unlock a site:

This increased the barrier to using a distracting site, but the downside was that people would just type gibberish after a while because there wasn’t much of a reason to type out reasonable things.

Several of my friends have reported that they often want to use normally-distracting sites in a productive manner (e.g. watch tutorials on YouTube) and not have that count toward their limit. Their solution so far has been to go into incognito, which defeats the whole purpose of having an extension like Intention. One way that groups can be helpful is to provide a way for people to put in their rationale for using a site (e.g. “Watching Firebase tutorials”) and have that be visible in their group as an accountability mechanism.

But I’m still talking about desktop, when I should really be focused on mobile. But I know that if I start working on mobile, I pretty much won’t come out of that rabbit hole until I have something working, which could honestly be weeks or even months from now. There’s a part of me that thinks that I should at least give marketing Intention as it is a shot because while mobile phones are definitely more distracting than desktops, there are still lots of people who would find it beneficial on desktop.

I feel like I’ve been talking about making this switch from development to marketing for a while now, but I’m having a hard time actually making the transition. Coding and product development is comfortable, whereas marketing and distribution are not.

Maybe one of the ways that I can do marketing in a way that I’m excited about is to write guides on my digital habits and have that link back to Hide Feed and Intention. I’ve been meaning to write about the way I manage my notifications, my phone use, my communication, etc. for a while now, and this can be a nice way to dedicate time to doing that without feeling guilty about it.

I like that idea quite a bit, even though I think I’m still avoiding doing the less-sexy-but-perhaps-more-effective work of compiling lists of journalists, bloggers, etc. and reaching out to them about my products. Maybe I can try to do this in batches? Write one post then reach out to 10 people then write another post then reach out to more people, etc.

There’s still some development that I need to wrap up (I ended up working on Hide Feed again to support Netflix and add a “today’s focus” feature… surprise surprise), so I’m going to give myself until Thursday to finish those things and release it. I’m hoping that by this time next week, I’ll have one piece about creating healthy digital habits that I can publish and share. It won’t matter if it gets attention or not — what I’m focusing on would be starting to put effort towards creating content that will hopefully help people discover these tools I’ve made to support my digital well-being.