Shepherd - Focus & Productivity Time Tracker
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Free Chrome extension that auto-tracks your focus, labels sites as productive or not, and grows a sheep based on how you spend your time. It’s effortless, private, and a little too honest about your browser habits.
Replies
Shepherd
Hey Product Hunt! I'm Yang, one of the makers behind Shepherd 👋
I'm also Co-Founder of Composite (composite.com), and Shepherd came from wanting to understand where my time was actually going in the browser, instead of just feeling guilty about procrastinating.
Why we built this
I used to end every week with the same uneasy feeling: I was busy, but what did I actually do? My days are long as a founder, and I couldn't tell you where any of my time went. I tried pomodoro timers, but they couldn't account for longer work sessions. And manual time tracking felt like another exhausting errand to remember.
My problem wasn't discipline, it was the lack of visibility and granular insights into how I was actually spending my time online.
So I built Shepherd! The name (and the sheep) are a little homage to where I'm from. I grew up in New Zealand, a 10-minute drive from sheep farms, so it felt right to bring a bit of home into the product 🇳🇿
I got our team at Composite hooked on it, then my friends from Stanford started using it too. Turns out everyone had the same blind spot.
What makes Shepherd different
Shepherd quietly runs in the background and tracks how you spend your day in Chrome. No manual input, no start/stop buttons, no friction, super lightweight, and completely passive.
🐑 Simple layout – Your browsing is categorized as productive or distracting in real time. One panel shows you exactly where your day is going, right now.
🐑 Live tracking – We visualize when you're typically distracted throughout the day, and give you a weekly health score. You can stop bad trends before they snowball, or double down on what's working.
🐑 Grow your sheep – This is the fun part! Every day, you get a new sheep that grows based on how you spend your time. Stay focused in long sessions and your pasture flourishes, and your sheep grows up healthy and strong. Get distracted too much and your sheep might get a little dirty. Or sick. It's weirdly motivating to keep a virtual sheep healthy.
Who it's for
Busy professionals, founders, students, really anyone who wants to understand their habits without adding another chore to their day.
I've been using it daily while building Composite and it's genuinely changed how I structure my work. My team has started getting competitive about their sheep, which was not the intended outcome but I'm not complaining 😄
Shepherd’s completely free and takes less than 30 seconds to set up. It's a lightweight Chrome extension, with no accounts or onboarding flows to sit through. I'd love your feedback! Check it out at shepherdtime.com 🐑
What's your biggest struggle with staying focused during the day? Would love to hear from you in the comments!
Shepherd
@yangfanyun A few folks have asked me about the sheep mechanic so I figured I'd explain how it works - it's really dead simple:
Every day you get a new sheep. The longer you spend in the browser, the bigger the sheep gets. The higher the proportion of time is spent on productive sites, the healthier it looks. If you're all over the place bouncing between tabs and distracting sites, your sheep starts looking rough - dirty, sick, a little gross. By the end of the day you can look at your sheep and immediately know how long you were browsing for, and how productive it was. 😄
If you've already installed it, drop a screenshot of your sheep in the comments. I'd love to see how they're doing! 💪
@yangfanyun Ho Yang. Congrats on launching! How does Shepherd motivate users to stay focused?
Gamification, streaks, reminders, analytics? Do you use research on attention spans or productivity psychology in your design?
The gamification with the growing sheep is genius — way more motivating than a boring time chart. "Anti-brainrot extension" made me laugh. Sometimes you need a little guilt from a virtual sheep to close that 47th tab.
Shepherd
@giammbo Thank you for the feedback Gianmarco!! Excited for you to continue using Shepherd :)
@yangfanyun Will do! Congrats on the #5 spot today, well deserved.
Shepherd
@giammbo Thanks for the support!
@timhuntproducts Of course! Keep shipping
That's so cute!!
sers can probably tweak what counts as productive (e.g., Notion good, Twitter bad for some), but how private is the data really? Does it stay fully local/on-device, or is there any cloud sync for cross-browser insights?
Also, do you have integrations or requests for it to play nicer with other productivity tools (like auto-logging focus blocks to calendars, or exporting sheep stats to Notion/ClickUp)?
Shepherd
@cathcorm Thanks so much Catherine! The sheep appreciate it 😄
Great questions. We take data security and privacy really seriously. Shepherd wholly utilizes local storage on your device. For the categorization, we use an LLM to classify sites (so we can differentiate between productive uses of, say, YouTube, from unproductive), but we have zero-data retention (ZDR) policies with all our LLM subvendors, so nothing gets stored on their end either.
There's no cloud sync between browsers or profiles right now, and that's by design for privacy and security reasons.
As for integrations, we don't have calendar syncing or exporting to Notion/ClickUp yet, but both are on the roadmap! In terms of prioritization, would love to know which one you'd want first 🐑
@yangfanyun Hey! Thanks for the quick reply. I'm VERY glad the sheep are happy ahahawwwnn 😄 (those little guys are stealing the show, honestly).
Love hearing your privacy-first approach. No judgment from me on the productive/distracting labeling 💛 it's subjective anyway, but the LLM classification for context sounds smart.
Shepherd
Hi everyone, I’m Varun, also on the Composite team that built Shepherd!
We originally built this for ourselves. Once we started using it internally and seeing what it surfaced, it was obvious other people might want the same visibility.
The core idea is simple. No setup, no configuration, no productivity theater. Install it and it passively shows you where your time actually goes.
Also, designing the sheep states was unexpectedly fun. Watching them change based on your behavior makes the feedback loop feel a lot more real.
Would love for you to try it and tell us what you think.
findable.
love the idea. Is it only tracking my computer, or my phone as well?
Would love to add the data to my Whoop & Apple Health stats too
Shepherd
@peterbuch Thanks Peter! Currently we’re only tracking your desktop browser. I’m curious - would it be helpful to create an export functionality which allows you to upload more easily to Whoop or Apple Health?
findable.
@yangfanyun thank you for the reply, yes, export would be useful for sure
Shepherd
@yangfanyun @peterbuch Thanks Peter!! We're on it 🫡
Product Hunt
Shepherd
@curiouskitty Great question! Shepherd categorizes every website you visit as either productive or distracting using an LLM model. The site's URL and page title are big indicators which we send to a smart classifier that understands context. So YouTube watching a coding tutorial counts as productive, but YouTube watching cat videos doesn't. If the confidence is low, we have a second layer of categorization that is much more deterministic.
Very rarely, we may get a website wrong. Feel free to let us know so we can adjust here!
Shepherd
@curiouskitty @timhuntproducts This was something we thought about a lot early on. We didn't want Shepherd to feel like a hall monitor that just blanket-blocks certain sites. The whole point is that context matters. Reddit doing research is different from Reddit doomscrolling at 11pm. That nuance was really important to us when designing the categorization.
Curious what other sites folks feel are tricky to categorize. YouTube and Reddit were the obvious one for us but I bet there are edge cases we haven't thought of yet (e.g., LinkedIn or X)!
Shepherd
@nourhan_abdallah Currently only available on Chrome!
Shepherd
@nourhan_abdallah @yangfanyun We are actively building a Firefox version - it's not too much extra work actually.
Are you a Firefox user? 🦊 Curious what the demand would be!
Shepherd
@hassaan4 @nourhan_abdallah Amazing, we'll keep you posted on the Firefox launch! Glad to know there's demand for it 🙏
Shepherd
Hi everyone! I'm Charlie, also one of the makers behind Shepherd 👋
Since we had so much fun building and using this tool internally, we thought that some of you may love it as well!
Designing the different sheep stages was one of the most fun parts of the build, watching them evolve from cute lambs to full grown sheep. Would love for you all to give it a try and let us know what you think!
Congrats on launching Shepherd to Product Hunt 🎉
I really like the user interface and the concept of growing a sheep, great concept to gamify productivity! It's adorable too.
Would be cool if you could see each sheep from each day in a farm like tab almost like a streak to see how well you've been doing over the week / month / year.
Hope more people find this useful. ❤️
Shepherd
@minhajulll Thank you Mj! Really glad you like the UI and the sheep concept ❤️
The farm/streak idea is awesome actually. We've been thinking about something similar where you can look back at your pasture over time, seeing them all interact with each other, and see how your flock has been doing. Definitely on our radar now. Thanks for the suggestion!!
Shepherd
@minhajulll @yangfanyun The pasture idea is so good. I kind of want to see the sheep interact with each other too, like the healthy ones hanging out together and the sick ones off in a corner 😂
Would you want that as a weekly recap type thing or more something you can check in on anytime?
@yangfanyun @hassaan4 I think the idea of a weekly or monthly recap could be pretty good. You may have stumbled onto something great here, like "Spotify Unwrapped" but for my productivity sheep, weekly may be too granular for me personally but see what other users think? Monthly defo and I would definitely like to be able to come back and check in or export my monthly flock data 😂 you know as all Shepherds probably do
Shepherd
Hey Product Hunt! I'm Tim, also a fellow maker behind Shepherd! 🐑
Shepherd is such an easy extension to just keep in the background as I go about my working day. I'll admit, when I first started using it, I was a little humbled by how often I got sidetracked. But once I could actually see my habits laid out, I started making real changes. Now there's nothing more satisfying than ending the day with a fully-grown, pristine sheep! 💪
My favorite part whenever I check in has to be the daily sheep fact. It's just a nice touch that adds a bit of personality to the experience. Didn't know I needed those in my life, but here we are. 😂
I'll be around for a bit to answer any questions. Would love for you all to try out Shepherd!