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Show HN: A Firefox extension to break the habit of typing distracting websites

by vishaldpatel on 11/2/15, 11:53 PM with 28 comments

• by hollerith on 11/3/15, 12:33 AM

  what I've been doing for the last 3 or 5 years (in Firefox, which is the browser under discussion in this submission) is setting the following to false:

  browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled

  browser.urlbar.suggest.bookmark

  browser.urlbar.suggest.history

  it does not literally stop me from typing in for example "news.ycombinator.com", but it makes it so that I have to type every last one of those 20 characters, which leaves enough time between my (impulsive) decision to act and my (fast and nasty) reward to prevent most instances of procrastination.

  (then I put frequently-accessed URLs that do not cause procrastination on the Bookmarks menu and the Bookmarks toolbar.)

• by afarrell on 11/3/15, 4:21 AM

  If you find yourself just turning this extension off or undoing the edits to your host file, you should try http://selfcontrolapp.com/ for OSX, which blocks URLs for a specified period of time without the ability to unblock them. It is open source, so in theory you could presumably go source diving to find a way around it, but that would take more effort and focus than doing whatever you are supposed to be doing.

  Also, if you find yourself desperately needing this, consider the possibility that you may want to get more/regular sleep, exercise, and better food. "Sleep is for the weak" is a load of horseshit. Your brain is a part of your body and you should take care of both. This got me through the last parts of undergrad and I am very grateful to the maintainers, but I wish I'd not needed it.

  EDIT: there is apparently an app http://getcoldturkey.com/ for windows. I've never tried it though.

  Also, Momentum for Chrome is a good replacement for the "recent pages" new tab screen: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...

• by GrinningFool on 11/3/15, 5:36 AM

  I've tried several tools similar to this, and they're all coming from the right place. But..

  1) being told that this isn't the time to do something doesn't change that I feel it's time to do something. It just annoys me.

  2) There's no substitute for simply making the choice to not go to those distracting web sites.

  Distractions abound, but in my experience I've found that looking to technology to solve what is fundamentally an error in my thought process is a mistake. Changing the thought process isn't the easy way to go about it but it is ultimately the only way that's going to be effective in the long term.

  Tools like this don't help much with that process[1]. Instead they provide [again, in my experience] a band-aid that helps cover the wound, so to speak - they let me avoid seeing that I needed to make changes.

  [1] one benefit they do provide is to make you more aware of what you're doing.

• by CGamesPlay on 11/3/15, 3:32 AM

  Related: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corre...

  I briefly used RescueTime's functionality for this. Eventually I actually settled on a separate browser profile for distracting sites. Basically, on my work Chrome, I only have productive sites, am not logged into any distracting services, or anything like that. I can use Chrome's user switching to open my "distracting" session, but the extra effort to do that helps me maintain focus.

• by ars on 11/3/15, 5:10 AM

  Leechblock works very well for this: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

  It counts how long you are on an "illegal" website and only blocks when you exceed the limit.

  It's fully customizable for timelimits and method of blocking.

• by itake on 11/3/15, 3:08 AM

  I like the idea. I find blocking websites with my host file being the best tool for protecting myself against distraction.

  It would be pretty neat if this was a website that I could point my blocked domains to

• by azar1 on 11/3/15, 3:13 AM

  I feel like it would work better if it took you to something like a shock website ;)

• by thucydides on 11/3/15, 3:14 AM

  Does anything similar exist for Chrome? AFAIK, default Chrome won't let you disable autocomplete in the address bar.

• by J_Darnley on 11/3/15, 1:05 PM

  Where the heck did the install button go to on Mozilla's website?