Introducing YouTubeWisely — Take Back Your Time on YouTube

The average person watches over an hour of YouTube every day — that's roughly 23 days a year. Most people have no idea where that time goes. We built YouTubeWisely to make the invisible visible.

YouTubeWisely is a Chrome extension paired with a web dashboard. The extension runs quietly in the background while you use YouTube, tracking which videos you watch and for how long. A subtle real-time counter on the YouTube page shows your daily watch time so you stay aware without any friction.

The web dashboard is where the deeper insights live. You can see weekly and monthly trends, a breakdown of time spent on regular videos versus Shorts, and a ranked list of the channels that consume most of your attention. The goal isn't to make you stop watching YouTube — it's to help you watch intentionally.

On the technical side, YouTubeWisely is a monorepo with a Next.js web app, a Chrome extension built with Vite and React, and a shared API layer. Watch events are stored locally in the extension using Chrome's storage API and synced to the server when the extension is linked to an account. Authentication is handled by Clerk, and the entire system is designed to be privacy-first — we collect only the viewing data needed to power the dashboard and nothing else.

We also took GDPR compliance seriously from day one. The privacy policy is detailed and transparent, users can delete their account and all associated data at any time, and we don't use any analytics, tracking, or advertising cookies.

YouTubeWisely is live on the Chrome Web Store and free to use. If you've ever wondered where your YouTube time goes, give it a try at youtubewisely.com.