u-do-u: volition pump chome extension
Problem
Something I find a bit depressing about the world we’re living in: self-discipline / restraint / superhuman focus is insanely important.
Temperamentally, I’m not the biggest fan of self-restraint. I think people who are really good at self-restraint tend to be boring, and my favorite kind of friend is the kind that will drop everything to go do something fun & stupid. I don’t know that I’m right in this view, but I see a continuum of open-to-the-world on one end, and self-restraining / in-charge / methodical on the other. I greatly prefer the open-to-the-world camp.
But on the internet in 2025, you just…kinda…can’t…be…open to the world and curious? Or you can, but if you do so naively you’re just going to end up distracted and unpleasantly pulled in a thousand different directions.
My Solution
u-do-u (github) is a chrome extension that, when you go from zero to Chrome window, triggers a popup that asks you to simply state your intention:
It then saves whatever you stated as your intention, and that’s it. You can then export the data, which is saved in the browser’s extension storage sandbox, and look back over your past sessions.
I thought about also saving your chrome history, so an LLM could potentially then give you a grade on how ‘on focus’ you stayed but I haven’t done that yet. I might not.
Just as-is I’ve been appreciating this chrome extension, and I don’t know that I want to complicate it any more. What I like about it right now is it’s just a small, subtle reminder–a volition pump.
I am finding that the pop up catches me unawares. Sometimes I open the browser off of muscle memory, and when given a fraction-of-a-second to reflect I realize that…I actually maybe don’t have anything I need to visit the internet for!
It’s also clarified that there is no particular online activity that makes me feel not so great, but rather the surfing without any particular strong intention that doesn’t always feel so good (and more importantly: is a crazy time suck). An alternate title for the blog post was: The right amount of time to spend on facebook is 3 Hours (every six months)
This is intentionally Just For Me (but feel free to use it)
I have fallen into a funny habit of feeling like every personal technical project I make should be well documented and potentially usable by others, including people more and less technically adept than myself.
It started in grad school, when I was jobless and searching for work, and at the time I think it made a good deal of sense that if I’m doing work, I might as well do it publicly. There was also a (small) virtuous cycle of, if I’m putting my name on it and putting it out there, it better be good, so I better try my best and all that.
There’s things I don’t love about this habit, though:
1: higher bar to do anything.
2: can get in-my-head while making things since there’s an implicit ‘This is gonna be public and represent you’
3: nobody ends up using my stuff anyways (or visiting my side-project sites) and I end up feeling like I ‘failed’.
So here, I am embracing the ‘Roll Your Own’ Era: using LLMs to make basically disposable software.