Build better habits online! Tell HabitLab your goals, and it will determine the appropriate interventions via experimentation.
HabitLab is an open-source research project from Stanford on helping users reduce their time online. It includes various tools like news feed blockers, comment hiders, and more. HabitLab will try out different tools and figure out what is most effective for you. Data on effectiveness will be recorded for research purposes.
HOW IT WORKS
Tell HabitLab which sites you want to spend less time on. We support all sites, including popular sites like Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Netflix.
Each time you visit a site, we will intelligently choose an intervention (which use techniques such as hiding your news feed, hiding comments, pausing videos, showing notifications if you've been on a site too long, and more) to help you reduce your time on the site. If you don’t like an intervention, you can choose to disable it.
HabitLab learns which interventions work best for you based on your browsing history and their past effectiveness, and uses this to more effectively help you reduce your time online.
ABOUT
HabitLab is an open-source project developed by the Stanford HCI Group. You can find source code at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab
PERMISSIONS
Chrome will ask you for the following permissions when you install. Here’s how we use them:
* tabs: We use this for showing productivity interventions such as showing timers, removing feeds, pausing video auto-play, etc (by using content scripts to modify sites) and monitoring time spent on sites (by detecting when tabs are opened and closed)
* webNavigation: We use this for detecting page navigations within a tab - such as clicking on a new video in Youtube - so we know when the productivity intervention needs to be updated
* storage: We use this for storing logs of how long the user has spent on each site and how effective interventions have been for the user. This is used for: 1) visualizing intervention effectiveness to users in the productivity dashboard, and 2) personalizing interventions to users by selecting those that have been most effective for that user
* history: We use the browsing history to determine what the user's most frequently sites are at the time of install, so we can show those to them as sites they want to set as goals to reduce time on. Is also used to show users how much time they are saving compared to before installing HabitLab.
* idle: We use this for determining when the user is idle, so we don't count that time in our time tracker.
notifications: We use notifications such as "You already spent 10 minutes on Facebook today" as a type of productivity intervention to help reduce users' time on sites they set as their goal sites.
* http://*/ and https://*/: Our productivity interventions (such as showing timers, removing feeds, pausing video auto-play, etc) are shown on all sites, so we need the 'http://*/'; and 'https://*/'; permissions.
PRIVACY POLICY
HabitLab sends us anonymized data about the effects of interventions on your browsing. You can opt-out of sharing data when you set up HabitLab, or later. See https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/wiki/Privacy for our privacy policy.
Latest reviews
- (2023-04-15) Hamdi Bel Hadj Hassine: Great extension. Plenty of customizable tools to block or monitor your web browsing.
- (2023-03-20) Alex: Doesn't work
- (2021-03-02) Jheiden Maveric G. Damasco: It's good for tracking your habits and getting exercise.
- (2020-12-23) Bryan Wall: Extension is broken on Chrome (and Edge) 87, and doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. It appears that this extension was developed as part of someone's graduate school project and is no longer being actively maintained. Most of the "nudge" features are broken in the latest versions of Chrome which makes the extension mostly useless. Many issues have been opened through their recommended bug reporting process on Github but no one seems to be monitoring them anymore.
- (2020-10-18) Daniel: Only 2 or so nudges work - the rest give the following error [Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read property 'dest' of null]. Using Brave as a browser.
- (2020-09-15) Konstantin K.: Probably best of its kind. (UPD. Unfortunately it stopped working on Twitter and some other sites for me)
- (2020-04-06) Jeremiah England: Probably great in its time, but currently is not maintained. The last commit to the repository was in June 2019 (as of Apr 2020). It's broken many places on the current version of Chrome. Only a few of the nudges work. repository: https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab
- (2019-06-11) Linh Chi Lý: Great extension. I love it, thank u so much developers!
- (2019-04-03) Rah: Its great, i really hope you can keeep it up and it gets more popular so we can support you on it
- (2019-03-29) Jean-François Racine: Had to uninstall it. Was draining my battery.
- (2019-02-06) Lohengrin Percival: Does not work.
- (2019-01-29) Benjamin Winig: This is the best productivity extension I have seen so far. It allows you to select "nudges" to control time spent on specific sites. Instead of blocking a site entirely, these nudges allow you to control your own usage through reminders, timers, and extra confirmation before playing a video on certain sites. Everyone who wastes more time than they would like to online needs to try this.
- (2019-01-19) Ref C.: This is honestly amazing! Perfect for better productivity. This needs to get more popular to help avoid distractions.
- (2018-12-05) Shivang P Swain: This is an amazing tool. IDK, how it is still not wildly popular.
- (2018-10-22) Jko Ggl: Excellent extension
- (2018-08-12) Jonathan Smith: Very good extension for increasing awareness of my browsing habits
- (2018-08-01) A Google User: Great! Except not all nudges are activated at once and it's a little confusing to use. But lose the functionality and concept.
- (2018-03-21) Easy to stay and get organized. Stop wasting time on stupidity, with any site. Also like that it displays how much time I've wasted on any site. Great for parents too! Can't recommend it enough!
- (2018-01-16) Aleksandar Pavic: I really love funny gifs when I close tabs. Highly recommended!