The Complete Ikizen Setup Guide: Transform Your Browser Into a Productivity Powerhouse

The Complete Ikizen Setup Guide

You installed Ikizen. Now what.

Quick honest answer: don't try to set everything up at once. Ikizen has a lot of widgets, and the temptation is to enable all of them in a fit of productivity enthusiasm and then never look at any of it again. Pick two or three things that actually solve a problem you have today. Add more later when you miss them.

This guide covers every feature. Use it like a reference — jump to the bit you need.

Getting started

Installing

Chrome: Chrome Web Store
Firefox: self-hosted .xpi (during early access, while we wait on the Add-ons store)

First new tab

Open a new tab after installing and you'll see a welcome screen with three ways in:

Guided setup — a short wizard that asks about your work style and goals and assembles a starting dashboard.
Load example dashboard — drops in four pre-filled widgets (Tracking, Links, Goals, Inspiration) you can edit.
Add your first widget — skip the help, build from scratch.

If you're not sure, do the guided setup. You can change anything afterwards.

The header

The bar at the top is your control panel:

The time (always there, can't be hidden, sorry)
A privacy-mode eye for when you're about to share your screen
A lock icon that drops you into edit mode for moving and resizing widgets
Your user menu, with sync and account stuff

Goals

Goals exist so you don't forget what you're meant to be doing. Click +, type the goal ("Ship 1.3 by March"), pick an icon, save.

Edit mode (pencil icon) lets you drag goals to reorder by priority, click to edit text or icon, or × to remove.

What works:

Three to five active goals, no more. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
Be specific. "Exercise 3× per week" beats "get fit". Your brain can't act on vague.
Update them. Weekly is great, monthly is fine, never is bad.

Tracking

For habits, daily targets, anything you want to actually do consistently. Water, workouts, reading, meditation, pages written.

Click +, name the thing, set a daily target (e.g. "8" for glasses of water), pick an icon. Save.

Each tracker shows a slider you drag to update your count. The progress bar fills as you approach the target. Hit everything for the day and there's a small celebration animation — yes, the dopamine is on purpose.

Streaks reward consistency: complete all your trackers within a period to extend the streak, miss one and it resets to zero. Your best streak is saved. Click Complete [Period] when you're done — that's what records progress and rolls the streak.

The stats panel (the small icon on the widget) shows current streak, best streak, overall completion rate, and a contribution-graph-style history.

Things I've learned from using this on myself:

Start with two or three habits. Don't try to track every aspect of your life on day one.
Make targets you can actually hit. Boring consistency beats heroic failure.
Track actions, not outcomes. "Run 3×" not "lose 5kg". The actions are what you control.

Quotes

Quotes show up on your dashboard for a small motivational nudge. When you first add the widget, hit Load example quotes for a curated starter set (Jobs, Einstein, Churchill, the usual suspects). Replace them with your own as you collect ones that hit harder.

One small detail: quotes stay visible even in privacy mode. They're safe to show on a screen-share. Everything else gets blurred.

Inspiration

This is your vision board. Images that remind you why you're doing any of this, with optional text overlays.

Click +, pick an image from your computer, add overlay text if you want, choose the position, save. Image size limit is 1MB for guests, 15MB if you're logged in.

Each image can have text on top — quotes, mantras, a single word, whatever moves you. Position it top or bottom, align left/center/right.

In edit mode, hover an image and the arrow keys move the text: Up to top, Down to bottom, Left/Right to align, C to center.

In widget settings, "Expand to fill space" makes images take up more of the widget.

A note: the images that work best are the ones that feel slightly embarrassing to admit move you. Photos of family, a place you want to live, the version of your work that doesn't exist yet. The widget doesn't care if it's the cover of a book you want to write or your kid's drawing. It just shows you the thing.

Life Left

Memento mori. The reminder that the clock is running.

In widget settings, enter your birth date and your life expectancy (default is 78). Pick a visualisation:

Progress bar — a simple linear bar of life used vs. remaining. Direct.
Time units — years, months, weeks, or days left.
Perspective — contextual phrasing like "around 45 more vacations" or "enough time to watch a child grow up twice". The line that hit me hardest the first time I saw it was the one about Mondays.
Ticker — a pulsing countdown that updates every minute. Most aggressive option.

For a more personalised number, switch to Calculated mode and enter gender, weight, height, smoking status, weekly exercise hours, and weekly alcohol units. It adjusts the expectancy based on actuarial data. Whether this makes you feel better or worse depends on the inputs.

This widget isn't trying to depress you. It's there because most of our worst decisions about time come from quietly assuming we have unlimited supply, and we don't.

Todoist

If you live in Todoist (a lot of us do), this widget brings your today and overdue tasks into the new tab so you don't have to switch apps to remember what you're doing.

Grab your API token: log in to Todoist, Settings → Integrations → Developer, copy the API token. Paste it into the Todoist widget's settings, save. Today's and overdue tasks appear within a few seconds.

What you see:

Today's tasks, sorted by priority then date
Anything overdue
Checkboxes that sync back to Todoist when you tick them

Only want the important stuff visible? Turn on priority filtering and set the minimum priority. Set it to P1 if you want to see only the genuinely urgent ones.

Tasks are cached for five minutes to keep your new tab snappy. Click the reload icon on the widget if you need a fresh pull.

Code Activity

GitHub and Bitbucket contribution grids, on your new tab.

GitHub setup: Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Tokens (classic) → Generate new token (classic). Give it a name like "Ikizen", select the read:user scope, generate, copy. In Ikizen, open the Code Activity widget settings, enable GitHub, paste. Username is auto-detected.

Bitbucket setup: Personal settings → API tokens → create a new one with read:user:bitbucket and read:repository:bitbucket. Copy. In Ikizen, enable Bitbucket, paste the token, add the email tied to your account, and optionally a specific workspace if you want to scope it.

The grid is the familiar one: weeks left-to-right, days Monday-to-Sunday top-to-bottom, intensity in four steps. Below it: current streak, longest streak, total contributions.

Activity data is cached for 24 hours since it doesn't change minute-to-minute. Hit reload on the widget for an immediate refresh.

Site blocking (Focus Mode)

This is Ikizen's blocker. Less about hard walls, more about friction at the right moments.

Click the Ikizen icon in your browser toolbar to open the popup, scroll to Blocked Sites, hit Add Block.

Enter the domain — no https://, no www., just twitter.com or reddit.com or whatever you're trying to spend less time on.

Then pick how strict you want to be:

No bypass — fully blocked during the schedule. Can't get in.
Click to bypass — a block screen with your motivation image. One click lets you through. Good for the autopilot Cmd+T moments — enough to make you pause without being a wall.
Confirm to bypass — you have to type a custom phrase before access. The phrase is up to you. Mine is something I'm not going to print here, but the rule is: write something that makes you feel slightly ridiculous typing it.

Some phrases that have worked for people:

"I am choosing distraction over my goals."
"This will not help me."
"30 minutes that I won't get back."

Scheduling. Set start and end times. Pick which days. Not every distraction needs to be blocked 24/7 — block social during work hours, leave it open at night if you want.

You can have multiple schedules per site. Block Twitter 9-12 and 1-5, allow it over lunch. Block Reddit on weekdays only. Whatever shape your day actually has.

Block image. When the block kicks in, you can show an image from your Inspiration widget instead of a generic block screen. This is the part the other blockers don't do, and it's surprisingly effective: instead of just being told no, you're reminded what you said yes to.

Reminder notifications. If you bypass a block, you can set Ikizen to nudge you again after a set number of minutes — 10 for aggressive, 60 for gentle. The block screen reappears when the interval is up.

A few example setups I've seen work:

Social media, maximum friction: domain twitter.com, confirm-bypass mode, phrase about your goals, all-day every-day.
News during work: news.ycombinator.com, click-bypass, 9–5 Mon–Fri.
Email during deep work blocks: mail.google.com, no bypass, 9–11 and 2–4. Sounds extreme but you survive.

Customising your dashboard

Click the lock icon in the header to enter edit mode. Grid lines appear, widgets get resize handles, everything becomes draggable. Press Escape or click the lock again to exit.

Moving is click-hold-drag. The grid snaps things into alignment.

Resizing is grab an edge or corner and drag.

The grid is twelve columns wide. Widgets can span any width 1–12 and any number of rows. The whole thing adapts to your screen size.

Adding widgets is either via the "Add more widgets" button on the dashboard if it's showing, or through the widget browser in settings.

Removing widgets is the gear icon on the widget → scroll to the bottom → Remove Widget → confirm. You can re-add it later but the data inside may not come back, so don't remove things on a whim.

Privacy mode

For when you're about to screen-share, present, or just don't want the guy at the next table seeing your goal list.

Hit the eye icon in the header to toggle. Hidden when active: tasks, tracking, goals, links, inspiration images, the life left visualisation. Still visible: quotes, the time, and the empty widget frames so the layout doesn't jump.

I use it three or four times a week. It's the small feature I'd miss most.

Theme

Light, dark, or auto (follows system). Click the Ikizen icon to open the popup, find Theme, pick one.

With a paid subscription, the theme syncs across devices and browsers so you set it once and it follows you.

Sync, backup, recovery

Ikizen works fully offline and locally with no account. Everything lives in your browser and stays there.

The paid subscription ($100/year or $300 lifetime — see pricing) gives you:

Real-time sync of your dashboard across browsers and devices
Automatic cloud backup so a browser reinstall doesn't wipe you out
Image uploads up to 15MB instead of the 1MB guest limit

Sync uses bidirectional replication: changes on one device show up on others within seconds, it survives going offline, and conflicts resolve automatically.

Manual export/import. Popup → Sync → Export Data saves a JSON file. Import Data restores from one. Useful for migrations or as a paranoid backup if you're not on the cloud plan.

Recovery. Deleted a widget by mistake? Popup → Recovery → Check for Deleted Items → restore. There's a window for this; it's not forever.

Force pull. If your local state has drifted, popup → Sync → Force Pull from Cloud overwrites local with the cloud copy. Useful but destructive in one direction, so only when you're sure.

Clean database. Popup → Sync → Create Clean Database wipes everything local and gives you a fresh start. Cannot be undone. Don't click this casually.

Keyboard shortcuts

Dashboard:

Shortcut	Action
`Cmd/Ctrl + 1-9`	Open link 1-9 in current tab
`Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + 1-9`	Open link 1-9 in new tab
`Escape`	Exit edit modes

Inspiration widget (in edit mode, hover an image):

Shortcut	Action
`↑`	Move text to top
`↓`	Move text to bottom
`←`	Align left
`→`	Align right
`C`	Center

When something's not working

Widget not syncing. Check you're online. Check you're logged in (your email shows in the user menu). Try Force Pull from Cloud. If it's still off, log out and back in.

Todoist not loading. Most often the API key. Copy a fresh one from Todoist's developer settings and paste it again. Verify the account is active. Clear the cache with the reload icon. If still nothing, remove the key and re-add it.

Code Activity not updating. Check the token scopes (read:user for GitHub). Remember the data is cached for 24 hours — hit reload for an immediate fetch. For Bitbucket, double-check the email matches your account. Verify usernames and workspace spelling.

Blocks not blocking. Check the domain (no https://, no www.). Check the schedule — is the current time inside a blocked window? Check the days — is today a blocked day? Check the bypass mode isn't "Click" when you wanted no-bypass.

One last thing

The goal isn't to build the world's most impressive dashboard. The goal is to spend less time on autopilot and more time on the work you actually want to do.

Pick two or three widgets. Live with them for a week. Tweak. Add more only when you notice the absence of something.

Ikizen is free forever and the free tier has every widget. We charge for sync and cloud backup because servers cost money. No ads, no investors, no dark patterns. None of that is going to change.

If you get stuck, the FAQ and changelog on the main site cover most things. If something's actually broken or you want a feature that doesn't exist, mail comes to me directly.

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