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Comment by redpanda_ua | Hacker News Reader

I noticed I can visit same websites (twitter, reddit, HN) few times in the span of 5 minutes. And I don't usually even notice that, it's like a habit. To help me break the loop I made this extension.

It only has basic functionality right now, and I want to add some form of statistics, and maybe more in depth personalization tools.

Apart from that, I also plan to port it at least to Firefox, but may look into Edge and Opera.

Would love your feedback, thanks!

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> I noticed I can visit same websites (twitter, reddit, HN) few times in the span of 5 minutes

And then there are those times when you load a website, see that there's nothing new/interesting on the front page, close that tab, open a new tab, and then reopen the same site. That always lets me know that I'm really far down the rabbit hole of procrastination.

I have been using StayFocusd [0]

It has a time limit. And various other settings to stop you from, for example, disabling the extension.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

This is nice. Better than /etc/hosts which I've used for this for a long time. Switching over to this.

I really like the simplicity of this. I find myself doing the same thing sometimes, e.g. opening HN almost unconsciously and then closing the tab immediately. Who knows, this might help break the habit!

Edit: (A simple suggestion that comes down to personal taste) It would be cool if I could see if I have DistractOff set to 'Stop' by just looking at the icon (in a similar fashion to how adblock shows the status via its icon) so I don't have to click into the plugin to see if it's on. But like I said, that comes down to personal taste.

Thanks for the feedback. Great idea, wrote it down.

Looking forward to the Firefox version!

I have used LeechBlock before, but this looks better adapted to my needs (break the loop, as you described it).

Another simple thing that helped me, is to clear those distraction pages out of browser history to stop autocomplete, so e.g. this no longer works: <ctrl-l>n<enter> to go to HN

I have to think a little bit more typing out the whole address and that already helps (and when I do I am at least conciously having a break and not just reflexively...).

I might find it useful if I could block myself from checking those sites more often than x minutes each, rather than blocking them off entirely on a set schedule.