Flow Club Companion
A browser extension supporting time awareness in virtual coworking sessions
Flow Club is a virtual coworking platform where people work together in timed sessions. While the platform provides structure, it's still easy to lose track of time during a session — either by becoming deeply absorbed in a task or drifting into distractions.
As a heavy Flow Club user myself, I experienced this repeatedly. Sometimes I would look up and realize the session was almost over. Other times I would drift away from the task entirely. In both cases, the timer on screen didn't help unless I stopped and checked it. I built Flow Club Companion to provide gentle audio cues and lightweight task support so users can stay aware of time passing without needing to constantly check the timer.
The Problem
You lose track of the session — in both directions.
Flow Club sessions provide real structure: a shared start time, a defined duration, and people working alongside you. But structure alone doesn't solve attention drift.
Sometimes you become deeply absorbed in a task and suddenly realize the session is ending. Other times attention drifts and you lose the sense of the session entirely. In both cases, the timer on screen isn't enough — it only helps if you interrupt your work to look at it.
Flow Club Companion introduces ambient audio cues — time awareness that reaches you without requiring visual attention.
What It Does
Calm structure. Every default tuned to help without intruding.
Four primary features, all configurable per user — because time blindness looks different for everyone.
A soft metronome every second — grounding for users who struggle with time perception. The session becomes something you can hear, not just watch.
Spoken time updates at configurable intervals (1, 5, or 10 minutes) so you can stay aware of the session without needing to check the clock.
Optional final-seconds alerts to ease session transitions. The end of a session feels deliberate, not abrupt — no jarring cut-offs.
Copy tasks between the extension and Flow Club's native "My Goals" panel. One less context switch between where you plan and where you work.
Per-user configurability
Volume, announcement frequency, cue type — all adjustable. The defaults are tuned to be helpful without being intrusive, but the extension respects that what works for one person may not work for another.
Extension
Technical Highlights
Built on browser primitives, without official APIs
The extension integrates deeply with Flow Club without any cooperation from the platform — pure browser APIs and observation.
A shared browser API abstraction unifies Chrome's callback-based and Firefox's Promise-based APIs, keeping the core codebase browser-agnostic. Two separate publishing pipelines (Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons), one unified codebase.
MutationObserver watches Flow Club's session timer directly from the DOM. No official API — just resilient observation of what the page renders.
Web Audio API for tick generation and volume control. Web Speech API for voice announcements. Both tuned to be calm rather than alarming.
Published independently
The Hard Part
Platform challenges during distribution
During development, the Chrome Web Store developer account associated with the extension was flagged and revoked, removing the extension from the store and disconnecting approximately 100 active users.
To recover, I established a dedicated developer account with improved publishing practices, republished the extension under the new account, and rebuilt the distribution pipeline across both Chrome and Firefox. Updates continued shipping throughout the transition.
Many of the original Chrome users are still on the older version and haven't migrated to the new one. That's a real loss I carry — when you have to restart from scratch, you don't just lose the install count. You lose the momentum the continuity that built up over time.
The experience reinforced that platform governance and account management are part of the product lifecycle, not an afterthought, when shipping software on third-party platforms.
What I took from it
Reception
“…we've loved seeing some of you hack together your own customizations — from Liddy's extension that adds ticking sounds, to scripts that categorize tasks…”
Getting a public shoutout from the platform's co-founder — for a tool I built because I needed it — is one of the things I'm most proud of professionally.
Reflection
Flow Club Companion started as a tool I built for my own workflow. Because I use Flow Club daily, the feedback loop between product development and real usage is immediate.
Design decisions are grounded in direct experience and community feedback. Small details — audio tone, cue timing, task interaction — were refined through real sessions rather than theoretical productivity frameworks.
The project reinforced how small, well-designed tools can meaningfully improve how people work.