You checked one thing.
Then lost 40 minutes.
Purpose Ratio shows when browser time stops matching what you meant to do.
Free and live on the Chrome Web Store.
No account required. Runs locally in your browser. You choose which sites to track.
Just now · YouTube
Did that match your purpose?
49%
A sample day across every site you track, not just one
The problem
Attention leaks out in small detours, all day.
A real-shaped session
YouTube · browser
Purpose: "watch a tutorial on sourdough shaping"
A 10-minute purpose quietly becomes a 47-minute detour. Purpose Ratio catches the moment you leave the tracked site and asks one question: did that match?
How it works
Four steps, ready the moment you open a tracked site.
Step 1
Open a tracked site
Right now, before the feed has a say, you know exactly why you’re here. That’s the only moment worth trusting.
Step 2
Say what you're there for
"Reply to one email." "Watch a tutorial." A few words is all it takes to set the one fixed point everything else gets measured against.
Step 3
Leave whenever you leave
There’s no timer forcing a stop, because duration was never the problem. A 40-minute deep-work session and a 40-minute scroll look identical on a clock. Only the outcome tells them apart.
Step 4
Confirm: did it match?
The pattern is what matters, not any one answer. A few confirms a day, every day, and it becomes impossible to ignore.
It only sees the boundary: when a tracked site opens and when it closes, never what happens inside it. Purpose Ratio tracks session boundaries, not page contents. It does not read messages, comments, passwords, or what you type.
Why this matters
Cognitive scientists have spent decades measuring exactly how attention drifts. Three of their findings:
47 sec
average time people spend on one screen before switching, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004
Mark, Iqbal, Czerwinski, Johns & Sano, "Neurotics Can’t Focus," CHI 201623 min
average time to fully refocus after a single interruption
Mark, Gudith & Klocke, "The Cost of Interrupted Work," CHI 2008up to 40%
of productive time potentially lost to the cognitive cost of switching tasks
Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, J. Experimental Psychology, 2001 (via APA)This is why Purpose Ratio checks in at the boundary, the moment a session opens or closes.
A little more purposeful, one day at a time.
38%
a scattered week
64%
a few weeks in
Find your own pattern
Free, and ready now.
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Prefer to look first? View a sample dashboardWe'll only use your email to send product updates. Research citations above are published and peer-reviewed. The before-and-after example illustrates the idea.