BreakFree : Where Digital Balance Begins!
Om Gate
The Problem
Around 60% of the world population consumes social media with the number being upwards of 4 billion people. With this, the daily social media consumption of an average person is now a mammoth 2.5 hours daily! Now social media is not all bad, it helps with connecting with your friends and family, congratulating people for their achievements, being up to date with daily affairs, etc.
However, an average of 2.5 hours is not a good sign. Excessive social media consumption can lead to various mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. It also leads to sleep problems and also reduces the attention span of a person especially for a teenager.
With this, it can harm your work and social life significantly. Social media addiction causes a lack of motivation and is linked to an increased habit of procrastination. This also leads to poor work ethics and ruins a person’s work ethic.
The bottom line is social media simply wastes time, it is not good for you by any means and something must be done to limit our social media consumption.
The Solution✨
Introducing BreakFree!
BreakFree will help you to limit your social media consumption by timing your social media consumption.
Add websites u want to break free from
BreakFree allows you to set timers for any social media applications you want and as many as you wish which are activated when you visit the selected websites.
Use BreakFree for your apps
Now you are ready to use the set timers for your apps!
Analyse your behaviour
BreakFree also helps you track the time spent on various websites you regularly visit and show you analytics based on that. The analytics show the total time spent each day, the total time spent on each website compared and also the time spent on each URL per day.
Your daily usage of websites tracked per day
Your Total Watch time for all visited websites
Your daily usage of individual websites
You have broken free from the excessive use of social media!!!
Overall BreakFree helps you restrict your social media usage by making you aware of the time spent and also makes you focus on your productive tasks without social media distractions. It also helps you track your progress in social media detox by some important analytics.
App walkthrough🚶🏻
Onboarding:
Once you install BreakFree extension, you are allowed to sign in with the help of your email id or Google account very easily thanks to Auth0!
Login to BreakFree
Creating timers: Create timers by selecting a website you want to time and set a timer for the same. You can easily delete a timer or simply update it too.
Now when you visit any website you set a timer for, the extension automatically starts the timer and stops your access to the website once the timer is reached!
When you exhaust your timer, the modal is going to show up restricting you from using the app anymore for the next 24hrs
And that's it! Yes! Using BreakFree is that easy! BreakFree is designed specifically so that it would be as easy to use as possible to allow people to start their social media detox!
You can also visit the analytics section on the BreakFree website to check your progress with social media usage!
How does BreakFree help?🤔
The main problem with social media addiction is that scrolling through social media sites becomes a habit and it becomes an impulse action. An average person does not times their social media usage and simply uses it whenever they might feel like it.
With this, there lies no control over the time spent on social media and hence what starts as “just 5 mins of this will not hurt anyone” ends up going for hours at times.
Hence as a solution, BreakFree allows you to set daily timers to these websites and once the daily timer is reached. it blocks your social media usage helping you with your social media detox.
BreakFree also allows you to check analytics which tells you about how much time you have spent on the internet each day, shows time spent on every website you used as well as the history of usage of various websites you used.
Technologies used⚒️
ReactJS and TailwindCSS - For the front end of our app
Grafbase - For our backend (the best graphql tool I have worked with)
Auth0 - User Authentication
Challenges I faced🚧
The main challenge for me was to understand GraphQL and understand its importance and also how to use it. As a developer who used REST APIs all the time, GraphQL did add a learning curve which I had to go through. Luckily, Grafbase was a great help as it generates the necessary API to be used for this app and also helps with its database.
Another challenge I faced was to create a web extension for the first time. As to display the timer and also to check whether you are using a social media website or not, an extension was the most crucial part of the app. Hence, it was a bit of a challenge to not only learn it for the first time but also to build this app too. However, I did enjoy this challenge wholeheartedly as I got to learn so much!
**What's in store for the future?**🔮
BreakFree can allow users to automatically redirect users to different websites after visiting a social media website chosen. For example, every time you try to visit let's say a social media app called socialapp.com, it will redirect you to schoolhomework.com to get your focus back to your school's homework
BreakFree can also become a mobile application for your digital well-being with tones of analytics and timers to cater to a mobile audience
Conclusion👋
As the past precedent goes, social media addiction is a real threat to a person and something needs to be done about it. With BreakFree, you can start your social media detox journey and hence will be able to focus on your life, work , and anything you want!
Important Links🔗
That's all folks👐🏻
I hope you liked BreakFree and I hope you find it useful. I had an amazing time working with grafbase.com. Thanks, hashnode.com for conducting this hackathon and for this amazing blogging experience!
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