Introducing Pause – A Chrome Extension for Intentional Browsing

We’re proud to introduce Pause by Freedom, a simple, free Chrome extension that challenges you to pause for a few seconds before visiting a distracting website. We’ve been using Pause for the past few weeks internally and are delighted with how a simple interruption can change your habits for the better.

Leveraging behavioral science, the interruption created by Pause gently nudges you to make informed, intentional decisions about how you are spending your time. Unfortunately, many of our actions in the web browser are compulsive. Open a tab and start to type “f…”, autofill does its thing and instantly you’re on Facebook.

Pause comes pre-seeded with a list of 50 top distracting websites, and you can add or remove sites from your Pause list. We’re going to make the amount of time you Pause configurable in a future version. If you’d like to see functionality added, please leave us a review and we’ll consider it.

Pause is a product of Freedom Labs, our initiative to develop and offer new tools and content that expand the possibilities for how we manage our relationship with technology. We’ve got a few other products in the pipeline for Chrome, including simple tracking and limiting plugins. We’ll announce them as they come online.

Pause is free. You can add it to Chrome here.