Set a goal/intentions/note to Take a Break or before opening a distracting App

Comment By: Lacy Galtere

Have you considered Moleskine Journey? Changed my life…

Pretty simple request,

Sometimes you have to do something actually productive on apps such as Instagram or Facebook but get dragged into scrolling through the feed. If we could have a notification that we have 5, 10 or any other number of minutes left (besides the default 1 minute) it could prompt us to do whatever we were gonna do initially.

Hello All,

I am a Product Manager by profession and I understand how feature requests can sometimes be misleading or vague.

I would focus more on explaining the pain point and I am sure Opal team is good enough to figure out a solution for it. So the problem is that in my life I want to make more conscious decisions and feel in control of my time. I also suffer from phone addiction and specifically social media. I have started a practice where I think of the goal when I want to open a app because in most cases when I open apps mindlessly I often forgot what I opened it for and end up wasting more time then I should. And this is not just for social media but for other apps too. My brain is wired to open an app whenever I feel free, so Opal does a good job by allowing me to block those apps but sometimes I need to open the app for genuine reasons too.

Back on the feature request, the way I would solve it is to allow me to select goal based apps. When I open those app, give me a dropdown or a textbox to choose my objective. This would serve as a reminder and wire my brain to do that as the first thing. If I slip, Opal should detect that I am using the app for sometime and send a reminder that ā€œhave you achieved your goalā€. This way I can feel more in control of my time and don’t fall on the slipper slope of opening the app and wasting hours on it or just not achieve what I wanted to.

4 Likes

I notice the need for something like this specially when researching some useful stuff and finding an YouTube or Reddit link.
In this context it would be productive, but then I need to unblock myself to do the work I’m doing at the moment.