Read Your Sheet

Soft-blocks distracting sites when your Chrome Reading List grows faster than you read it.

You save things to read later. You do not read them. Then you open YouTube. Read Your Sheet watches your Chrome Reading List, and when the pile is growing faster than you are clearing it, the sites you have chosen stop opening — until you catch up. It is a nag, not a wall. When a blocked site is gated you get a screen with your actual numbers, a short countdown, and a list of the things you saved and never read. You can go through anyway. You just have to look at the pile first. HOW IT DECIDES Blocking is based on a ratio, not a fixed backlog size: by default it kicks in once you have saved 3 more items than you have read over the last 7 days. A fixed threshold punishes people who save a lot and lets a stagnant backlog slide forever. Net growth tracks the thing that actually matters — the pile getting bigger — and it clears itself the moment you catch up. There is also an optional total-unread ceiling, off by default. Everything is adjustable: which sites, the rolling window, how strict, how long the countdown is, and how long a site stays open after you push past it. IT DOES NOT TRAP YOUR SAVED LINKS If five things in your Reading List are YouTube videos and YouTube is blocked, you would never be able to clear them. So anything currently unread in your Reading List always opens, even on a blocked site — the block screen lists those links first. The exemption covers that one page, not the whole site, so when the video ends and autoplay moves on, you are back at the block screen. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION No account, no servers, no analytics, no network requests at all. Your Reading List is read in the browser and stays there. Your settings sync between your own computers through your Google account, the same way your bookmarks do. Access is requested per site, one at a time, as you add them — the extension cannot see any site you have not explicitly approved. Source available for inspection: https://github.com/sandlex/readyoursheet REQUIREMENTS Chrome 120 or newer, on desktop. Uses Chrome's built-in Reading List, so nothing to set up beyond choosing which sites to gate.