Mindful Noting

About

With Mindful Noting, the goals are to:

    • Understand the exact emotional urges, thoughts, and expectations that lead you to consuming different types of content
    • Learn to recognize which content choices you will (and will not!) regret
    • Play with the intentions you bring to the content you consume

How this is done:

For any web page you specify, Mindful Noting will open a “Before” popup that prompts you to take note of your mental state and set your intentions. Upon leaving the page, an “After” popup will then prompt you to reflect upon your experience. These “Before” and “After” notes will be stored locally so you can revisit them at any time and begin to notice patterns.

There are also “optimized domains” that have unique logic to show the “Before” and “After” popups at the most optimal times. If these domains have video content, that content can also be automatically paused. Current optimized domains include:
    • YouTube
        ◦ Popup+pause per video page
        ◦ One shared popup+pause for all YouTube Shorts
        ◦ Popup per YouTube Playable (YouTube browser game)
    • Netflix
        ◦ Popup+pause per video page (per movie or episode)
    • Twitch
        ◦ Popup+pause per stream page
        ◦ Popup+pause per VOD page
        ◦ One shared popup+pause for all Twitch Stories
    • Reddit
        ◦ Seamless note sharing between www.reddit.com, old.reddit.com, and sh.reddit.com
        ◦ Popup on the homepage
        ◦ Popup per subreddit (must visit the actual subreddit page, not just view comments on a post)
        ◦ Popup per “Games on Reddit” browser game

If the automatic popups are too obstructive, you can always turn them off and manually leave notes by clicking on the extension in your browser’s toolbar. There’s even a quick “3 hour popup break” feature if you want to take a short break but have popups automatically start up again later.

To reiterate: Your notes will be stored LOCALLY ONLY. They will never be uploaded anywhere or shared with anyone. Be aware that if you uninstall the extension, all notes will be deleted. There is a feature to export notes to a file if you ever need to back them up, and also a feature to import them if you’d like to move the notes between browsers/devices.

Note that websites that once worked correctly with the extension may stop working if their UI changes. Please reach out with any issues you find and I will do my best to resolve them.