A privacy-first Chrome extension · v1.17.0
Take back controlof YouTube.
FocusTube turns YouTube from a distraction engine into a focused learning environment — removing the noise, timing the sessions, and showing you yesterday before today drifts.
YouTube is useful — lectures, tutorials, documentaries, the one video that explains the thing. It's also a machine tuned against your intention:
Shorts
An infinite slot machine one swipe away
Autoplay
The next video starts before you decide
Recommendations
Optimized for watch time, not for you
Ads
Pre-rolls, mid-rolls, banners, bumpers
Endless feed
A homepage designed to never end
Rabbit holes
One click from research into re-runs
An Apple-Fitness-style triple ring, purpose-built for attention. Deflected counts ads, Shorts and urges skipped. Focused counts deliberate Pomodoro minutes. Saved counts the minutes blockers handed back to your day.
Deflected
Ads, Shorts & urges skipped
Focused
Pomodoro focus minutes
Saved
Minutes returned by blockers
Close all three and the day celebrates — once, quietly. Show up four days a week and streak insurance banks a freeze for the day life happens. Anti-gaming math underneath means the score is earned, never manufactured.
A week of closed rings — with one rainy Wednesday, insured.
Each layer removes one more way to drift — and adds one more reason to stay deliberate.
FocusTube removes the machinery of distraction at the source. Shorts are eradicated from the interface, ads are skipped before they play, and recommendations can disappear entirely — leaving only the video you came for.
- Shorts eradication across YouTube
- Auto-skip ads and hide banners
- Hide comments, cards, end screens and metrics
- Keyword and channel blocking
Start a quick 5, 15, 30 or 60-minute lock, or schedule recurring focus blocks. A live, real-time countdown keeps the session honest — when the ring closes, YouTube steps aside. Pomodoro presets (25/5/15) and a Deep Work mode that auto-blocks everything else are built in.
- Quick locks: 5 / 15 / 30 / 60 minutes
- Scheduled daily blocks with live countdown
- Pomodoro 25/5/15 with Deep Work auto-block
- Quiz-gated unblocks when willpower wobbles
The first browser open of the day opens your briefing: yesterday's Focus Score, rings, 7-day trend and where your time actually went. It's the fresh-start effect, applied to attention — review yesterday in the morning, so today is chosen, not drifted.
- Focus Score, rings and 7-day trend at a glance
- Where your time went — by site and minutes
- Evening opens become a wind-down recap of today
- Sleep Guard winds YouTube down at night (22:30–07:00)
Before a video starts, FocusTube asks once: state your purpose and planned minutes. Watching on purpose beats watching on autopilot — the dashboard gains an Intent Match rate, the share of sessions that ended on-purpose. “Just browsing” starts an honest mindful countdown that re-asks when it expires.
- One-tap intents: learn, music, tutorial, planned entertainment
- Planned minutes — the session ends when they do
- Intent Match rate on the dashboard
- Based on implementation-intention research (Gollwitzer, 1999)
Bring your own key from Gemini, OpenAI, Mistral, DeepSeek or xAI and the Summary button appears under any video. Get the gist, key points and chapters without watching all 47 minutes — your key talks to your provider directly, and FocusTube stores nothing in between.
- BYO key — Gemini, OpenAI, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI
- One click from the player, transcript-aware
- Output is HTML-escaped and sanitized
- Keys never sync, never log, never leave the device unencrypted
Bring your own key — requests go browser → provider, nothing in between.
Pick your focus buddy during onboarding — Mika, warm and cheery, or Haru, calm and steady. They guide setup Genshin-style, float on every site with a live site clock, and wear one of 8 emotion faces driven by the site's score: happy on deep work, worried on feeds, joyful when your rings close.
- 8 emotion faces × 4 poses × 2 characters
- Hand-authored parametric SVG — about 16 KB, no models
- Tap-to-expand panel: rings, saved time, quick blocks
- Drag anywhere, hide per site, honors reduced motion
The dashboard turns your attention into something you can read at a glance: a 30-day heatmap, activity timeline, watch-time topics, and a Focus Score designed to resist gaming — diminishing returns, daily caps and diversity weighting mean pressing “Block 30 min” a hundred times cannot buy a perfect score.
- Focus Score with anti-gaming design
- 30-day heatmap and activity timeline
- Watch-time topics and hashtag tracking
- Day / week / month navigation with lifetime totals
Real production UI, captured from the shipped extension. Switch between the surfaces you'll actually touch every day.
Focus Score, Focus Rings, heatmap and monthly review — the full picture of your attention.
100% local
Blocking, scoring, analytics and rings compute on your device. Unplug the network after install — everything but AI summaries keeps working.
No telemetry
No account, no cloud, no analytics pipeline. There is no server to send anything to — that's an architecture, not a promise.
Your keys, your provider
AI summaries use your key and talk straight to Gemini, OpenAI, Mistral, DeepSeek or xAI. FocusTube stores nothing in between.
Hardened MV3
Validated message payloads, escaped AI output, minimal web-accessible resources — 20 security issues triaged and fixed in v1.0.1 alone.
Install from source in five minutes, close your first ring tonight, and read yesterday over coffee tomorrow.