Ben Tossell

Escape - Track all your unnecessary trips to distracting websites

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Ben Tossell
Pretty nice looking Mac app to track website usage! EDIT: However, everything I do on a day to day for my job, actually counts as a distraction haha! Would love to be able to edit it and put Product Hunt as a non-distraction for me 😬! EDIT #2: I keep getting "you should sign up for Focus Time to help with your distractions", its not overly invasive because of the interface in the app, but would happily pay a few $ to just not have it come up I hope @_vojto can jump in here today!
Vojtech Rinik
@bentossell Hey guys, sorry about being late to the party – I was taking a break from the internet. Soo. I see that a big concern is that FocusList ad. Well, we built Escape really to be a marketing gimmick for FocusList. It appears about every 20 times you launch the app. We didn't think it all the way through, and really just wanted to see the reaction – but I'll be watching comments & reviews closely and updating how it works in the next version. Next, a big issue is that you can configure what is and what isn't distraction. I heard complains from users in Japan about this – as they have completely different set of distracting websites. Would anyone be interested in contributing if we just open-source this?
Dmitry Suholet
@_vojto @bentossell Yes! It would be super awesome if you open-source Escape.
Nikola Novakovic
@_vojto @bentossell App is pretty cool and gives you linear view of things and where did you got distracted. Which is awesome. It has a nice UI as well. Thing is when I downloaded it I spent five minutes searching where can I customize settings to set up what actual distractions are. So if you open source it I bet community would help to make this feature live!
Nate Smith
I'm borderline scared to download this app. I'm worried it's a "if you don't want to know, don't ask" type of situation.
Danny Chang
@imns81 Kind of like avoiding going on WebMD when you're in pain because you'll inevitably discover you have some terrible disease.
Hien Lam
@thedannychang @imns81 doesn't help that every diagnosis on Webmd for any symptom is an incurable cancer haha
Anton Eliasson
Here's the obvious question... Is Product Hunt registered as a distracting website?
Ben Tossell
@antoneliasson haha... well if it is then apparently I'd be wasting about 15 hours a day and doing no work 😝
Ohad Ron
RescueTime[https://www.rescuetime.com/] Does a really good job for me - it sends me a weekly report of how I spent time that week and has a good map of which apps/pages are productive and which are distracting.
Vojtech Rinik
@ohadisohad I use RescueTime too! But the problem is it only adds app the time. Not enough. What kills you is going to Facebook for 4 seconds every 5 minutes. Yes, it adds up to 1 minute over a morning, but it's so much worse than browsing for one minute! I like to compare this to falling asleep: If you hear a SHORT alarm every 5 minutes, will you ever fall asleep? And if you keep listening to an annoying alarm for 5 minutes and they you get to go to sleep, isn't it easier?
Nazila Merati
@ohadisohad I love rescue time, but the weekly reports aren't enough. I need a daily report so that I can do better incremently.
jari
Great app! Is slack really a distraction though?
Ben Tossell
@jarizwarts have you read Slack, I'm Breaking Up With You? haha. Depends on the person though. As a remote worker and community manager, I need it
jari
@bentossell Welp, I think it's kind of dawning on me that I have a serious slack problem...
Chris Church
@bentossell I agree, this app wouldn't work for me as I'm a social media manager and I'm on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. during my work hours. Apps looks gorgeous though.
Fitz Tepper
Hey, TechCrunch isn't a distracting site!
Bud Hennekes
Would be really cool to see a Pavlok integration. cc @maneesh
Dmitry Suholet
@aboundlessworld @maneesh @_vojto +1 for open-source the project. I use Pavlok and it's awesome tool that has API.
Gigi Tsui
Not sure if I want to know my result 😅 What user data does the app collect? There's no FAQ or privacy policy in the website, app or app store description.
Vojtech Rinik
@gigitsui Ooops. I'll talk to our lawyers about that. Wait, we don't actually.. Sorry, I'm just joking, but I wasn't expecting it to be on Product Hunt under the spotlight. To answer your question, it uses Amplitude, but only 1 event – Launch, to track how many active users we have. And there's a signup form (which you can skip) connected to Parse, but it doesn't do anything yet, only creates account in Parse. We built that because in the future we would love to share anonymized data (with user's consent of course) with researches – but it was all going to depend on whether anybody would like it or not.
Benjamin Lupton
Why does this ask for account details? Why does this try and connect to fbp.rinik.net and api.amplitude.com - of which blocking seems to make the application no longer work? It is never mentioned that it sends data to the cloud or why - and no privacy policy is provided.
Angel Botto
OMG that colors!! awesome upvote!!!
Giridhar
This looks amazing and the design is just lovely. One concern though, XCode is not detected properly, i think its detected as Mail instead !! And it'd be nice, if it comes as a menubar pop up instead of a separate app (After clicking the 'open escape' everytime).
Jascha Brinkmann
@giridharvc7 I see a lot of Mail opens as well, even if I don't use it at all. Looks like everytime I open Gmail, it shows Mail open as well.
planetMitch
Downloaded and not recording anything... am I doing something wrong? No way to report problems, no support... no way to update blacklist that I can see.
Quentin Lacointa
Nice one! Would love to have reddit on it. Half of my day go in there..
Wilhem Pujar
Interesting little tool but I have two concerns... First, any app tracking what you're doing on your computer is a concern for both your privacy (what's this signup form for?) and your machine's stability :) And second, it's hard to qualify distraction, so there will be a tons of false positives... I don't think that engaging my customers of social media can be considered a waste of time, for instance. There are many way to make this more useful. If this was connected to a set of productivity tools, with tasks explicitly involving a set of websites, you could better infer that a given website had a negative impact in achieving a given goal.
Sagiv Ofek
how can i customize the blacklist?
Jacob Marshall
Any chance of a version compatible with OS X 10.10?
Ghost Kitty
Comment Deleted
Anis Souames
I like it, just bookmarked it, I think it will be a huge boost for productivity .
Mahieddine Cherif
Great work !
Rik
Hahah this is embarrassing. Average time between interruptions 6min