What's New: Dashboard Overhaul, Smarter Onboarding, and Better Defaults

It's been a big week here at Heyday! From user interviews, to setting up the blog your reading, to working on a ton of new features, it's been good.

Let's get into it!

The feedback from some early users was clear: "I love what Heyday does, but I want to see what it's doing."

Fair. So I rebuilt the dashboard.

The Dashboard Actually Tells You Something Now

The old dashboard was basically a settings page. Functional, but boring. It didn't answer the question you probably have when you open Heyday: Where did my time go today?

The new one does.

Overall Time

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Right at the top, you'll see your total browser time since midnight, plus a 7-day average. More importantly, it breaks down how you spent that time:

• Productive (probably work stuff)
• Distracting (you know what this is)
• Neutral (everything else)

I'm auto-categorizing sites based on common patterns for now. Google at 2pm? Productive. Social Media at 2am? Less so. You'll be able to override these soon with a future release, but the defaults should help you get a sense of what works for now.

Impacts Applied & Blocks Triggered

Two new counters show how many times Heyday stepped in today:

• Times an impact was applied (grayscale, feed removal, slowdowns, etc)
• Times a site got fully blocked

Think of these as "saves." Little moments where the internet tried to pull you in and Heyday said "nah."

Top 10 Sites

Your most-visited sites today, ranked and colour-coded.

Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad about where you spend your time. But you can't change what you can't see. And sometimes just seeing it is enough to shift behaviour.

People Were Missing the Toolbar (My Bad)

Here's something embarrassing: a bunch of early users didn't know the toolbar menu existed.

The toolbar is how you use Heyday — it's where you pause restrictions, apply quick impacts, check your schedule. It's not some hidden power-user feature. It's core functionality.

And I was doing a terrible job explaining it.

So now:

• There's a reminder card on the dashboard after you install
• The onboarding flow explicitly tells you to pin the extension
• Visual callouts show you exactly where it lives

Basically, I'm making it impossible to miss. Because if you don't know the toolbar exists, you're not really using Heyday.

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Actual Defaults That Do Something

Every new install now comes with site lists and schedules already set up:

Site Lists:

• Your Starter Site List — Common time-sinks with impacts already applied. You can use it as-is or treat it as a template.
• Block Everything List — For when you need a real break (digital detox, sleep mode, etc.)
• Work Focus List — Productivity mode. Fewer distractions, still functional.

Schedules:

• All Day — Always on
• Digital Detox — Sundays only (or whenever you want actual rest)
• Sleep — 11pm–7am (adjust to your actual sleep schedule)
• Work Day — Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm

You can edit or delete any of these. But starting with something is better than staring at a blank configuration screen.

Before this, new users had to build everything from scratch. That's fine if you love tinkering. But most people just want something reasonable that works, then tweak it later.

What's Coming Next Week

I'm already working on the next release:

• Redesigned block screen (the current one is... functional). Folks have given me some great ideas on how to improve.
• Better limit warnings
• A handful of stability fixes

The plan is to keep this rhythm: ship something, listen to what breaks or confuses people, fix it, repeat.

Heyday gets better by building it with you, not in a vacuum.

As always, if something's broken or confusing or you just want to yell at me about a design choice, hit me up: hello@heydayfocus.com

OR USE THIS FORM.

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Quick technical notes:

• Dashboard metrics reset at midnight in your local timezone
• Site categorization uses pattern matching and domain lists (it's not perfect, but it's pretty good)
• Default site lists and schedules are just templates — delete them if you want, Heyday still works fine

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