For a long time, hiding distractions had a weak spot. The popup had a Deactivate button. One click and the YouTube feed was back. And the moment you most want to click that button is usually the moment you shouldn’t.
So we took the button away.
Now, when you want to see a site as it normally is, you pause it from the popup for 5, 15 or 30 minutes. Before the pause starts, you wait. The first pause of the day makes you wait 10 seconds. The second one, 30 seconds. Then a minute, then two. If you close the popup while you’re waiting, nothing happens.
This turned out to matter more than anything else we’ve shipped in a while. Most of the time I reach for the feed out of habit, not because I need something there. Ten seconds is long enough to notice that, and by the time it’s done I’ve usually gone back to work. When I really do need the site, ten seconds costs me nothing.
When the pause runs out, hiding comes back on by itself. (Nobody ever remembered to turn it back on. I certainly didn’t.)
The result is that I just leave it on now. Before, I’d turn it off “for a minute” and find it still off a week later.
Seeing the time you got back
The second change is smaller, but I like it a lot. Every site’s stats page now has an export button. Pick a date range and you get a CSV with one row per day: the date, how long you spent on the site, and how many times you opened it.
Here’s a little experiment if you’ve had SuperFocus installed for a while but kept hiding switched off. Turn it on today and leave it alone. Come back in a week, open the stats for your worst site (mine is YouTube), pick the last 14 days and export. Put the week before next to the week after. The difference is the time you got back.
You can also hand the CSV to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it what changed. It’s your data, so slice it however you like.
Like everything else in SuperFocus, this stays on your computer. The export is a file in your downloads folder. Nothing gets sent to us.
Why we’re doing this
A handful of very large companies make their money from your attention. They have thousands of smart people working on keeping you scrolling, and they’re very good at it. You open YouTube to look up one thing and an hour is gone.
We’re a small team and we’re not going to out-engineer them. But we can put a little space between you and the feed, and show you the numbers. The goal of SuperFocus is pretty simple: give people their time back.
If you try the new pause and something about it bugs you, tell me. I read every message.
Anil
