Story

Hey HN, A few months ago I noticed I was spending way too much time on YouTube + Reddit (like 4–5 hours per day). I tried a bunch of blockers, but most of them just hard-block everything… and when I actually need a YT for debugging, I end up disabling the blocker and never turning it back on.

So I built ZenBlock to solve my problem: it blocks distracting sites, but when you try to open one, it shows a short breathing exercise, After that you can choose to get temporary access (5–30 min). The goal is to make you aware of distraction. this is more inclined towards

Tech-wise: it’s built using Chrome extension blocking rules (Manifest V3 / declarativeNetRequest) and a local timer to handle the “allow for X minutes” part.

This might sound a bit funny, but for me it genuinely helped — my watch time dropped from 4 hrs to 2.5 hrs/day mostly because I got tired of waiting. It got analytics too which store all data to local storage only.

Would love feedback on:

does the breathing pause feel helpful or just annoying?

what would make you keep an extension like this installed long-term?