For parents
An accountability partner in Hubbub gets two things: a recap of how the day's focus went, by email, and the final say on whether a blocked site stays unblocked. Setup takes about five minutes on their Mac, plus one click in your inbox.
You can't turn this on. There's no parent account, no way to request access to someone's Hubbub, and nothing you can install on their Mac that would let you. The invite only goes one way: they send it, they choose what you see, and they can end it in one click — at which point you're told it ended.
That isn't a gap we plan to close. A tool a kid can't switch off is one they'll spend the term learning to beat, and lockdown tools lose that race on day one. An arrangement they opted into is one they'll keep. So the ask — “would you put me on this?” — is genuinely the first step, and the setup below is something to do sitting beside them.
Steps 1 to 3 happen on their Mac. Step 4 is yours.
This part happens on the machine Hubbub runs on, in their account — so it's a five-minute job to do sitting next to them, not something to set up on your own. Open the Report tab and scroll to the bottom: the Focus partner section sits under the day's numbers.
Then pick how often: Every day, or Once a week. Daily is the default and the one that actually works — someone who hears about a rough Tuesday on Tuesday can say something about it, while a weekly summary arrives as a post-mortem.
Open “See a sample recap” before sending. It shows the real email, filled with a made-up day, and it's the honest way to settle what you'll be seeing — including the named apps and sites — before anybody commits to it.
You'll appear in their list straight away, marked “Waiting for them to confirm” in red until you do. Nothing is sent to your address in the meantime — one invite, and silence unless you say yes. They can have up to three partners, so two parents and a coach all fit.
This is your part, and it's the only thing you have to do. The email says who invited you, what you'll see, what you won't, and the one thing only you can do. Nothing arrives at your address until you click — so if it isn't there, check spam before re-sending from their Mac.
Your row loses the red warning, and recaps start arriving at 8pm their time (weekly ones on the last evening of their week). They get their own copy of the same email by default — the “CC me on the recap” box — so nothing about them goes out that they can't read themselves.
This is a recap in full, with a made-up day in it — the same sample the app shows before anyone presses invite. The percentage is focused time against off-task time; the two lists at the bottom are where the time went, ranked.
Where the recap stops
Sites are named by site and never by page: youtube.com can appear, the video they watched can't. It carries no task titles, no notes, no messages and no screenshots, and there is no setting that adds any of them. Anything Hubbub classifies as sensitive — health, banking, dating, adult — is stripped on their Mac before it's ever sent anywhere, so it can't appear in a recap at all. And on a day Hubbub wasn't running, the email says that in as many words rather than reporting a zero — for a few days, after which it stops repeating itself and goes quiet until there's something to report.
This is the half people don't expect, and it's the half that does the work. Everything here starts with them.
Once you've confirmed, they can't quietly whitelist anything any more. The only unblock they have left is one button — “Unblock for 30 min & ask partner” — which gets them back to work immediately and sends the question to you. They can add a note with it, and the app tells them, before they click, that you'll see the page link, its title, and whatever they wrote.
The site or page, its title, why Hubbub blocked it, their note, and how many times they've unblocked it. This is the one email that names a page rather than just a site — because you can't sensibly answer “should this be allowed for good?” without knowing what “this” is, and because they chose to send each one.
Neither button in the email decides anything on its own. It opens a page showing the same details with your choice preselected, and the decision is only recorded when you press the button there. That's deliberate: corporate mail scanners click every link in an incoming email, and a link that recorded an answer would approve requests nobody had read.
Approve makes it permanent. Decline adds no rule at all — their 30 minutes still run out on their own, so you haven't cut anything short. Doing nothing lands in the same place as declining, quietly: the time expires and the site goes back to being blocked. They're emailed your answer either way, so they aren't left guessing.
The links stay live for 7 days. If they unblock the same thing again, it reuses the same request rather than opening a second one — so a pile-up of emails about one site is still one question, and answering any of them answers all of them.
Every recap has an unsubscribe link, and one click ends it — no reply, no account, no asking them. They're told that it stopped, which is the point: a quiet exit would leave the other person believing something is still running that isn't.
One thing worth knowing before you use it: an address that unsubscribes can't be invited again by that person. If the daily rhythm is just too much, ask them to switch you to weekly in the same section instead — you'll get an email when they do. And if they end it from their side, you'll hear that too, and their unblocks go back to being their own business.
Something not matching what's described here, or an invite that never arrived? Email support@77sparx.com and we'll sort it out. If you're here before Hubbub is — it's a Mac focus coach for the homework laptop, and you can read what it does for parents or request a beta invite.
