Ask HN: Strongest way to block distracting sites?

In your hosts file add:

    127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
    127.0.0.1 other.distracting.site
    ...etc

Windows, Linux, MacOS all have a hosts file if you don't know where it is google it real quick. Editing a file is pretty annoying for me especially if the file requires admin rights, I think mac has a few distraction apps (google should probably find some) and windows/linux probably do too.

Disciplining yourself with a timer reward system may work well for some people (1 hour working, 10 minutes web browsing set to an egg timer).

Set "noprocrast" to yes in your HN profile. maxvisit defines how many minutes you are allowed to stay on HN, minaway the minutes until the site will be available again. Such a great feature, only works on HN though.

Best by far that I've found is SelfControl by Steve Lambert - thanks Steve!

http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/

It's OSX only though I'm afraid. It blocks at the network driver level and survives a restart. I switch it on for two hours or more, after one check of my email, before starting work in the morning. This initial two hours of inability to visit distracting sites usually gets me in the groove with whatever I'm working on. I then find I'm less likely to get distracted throughout the rest of the day and more able to stay focused on my daily task list.

I've been developing a system designed to get my procrastination under control. Fifty percent of this procrastination takes the form of reading posts from HN. So I feel your pain! My system is based on a modified version of Bill Westerman's GSD system (http://www.utilware.com/gsd3.html). I've got a draft blog post that describes it and the software I have used recently to help me focus. It's helped me finally get round to building what I think is going to turn into a pretty useful app for managing résumés.

I'll post a link to the blog article soon so keep an eye out for it here on HN.

If you really want some peace from distraction on the net -- disconnect your Ethernet cable.

Anecdote: I went without the net for about a month a few years ago and during that time I picked up Python, starting with zero knowledge of it, with just the copy Diving into Python that so happened to be on my Ubuntu machine. I had nothing better to do and nothing to distract me so I figured what the heck, I'll learn this language. I think it was one of the best things that happened to my programming career because it's now my language of choice.

If you use Chrome, there's an extension called Focus (I think) that works extremely well. The only problem is that it's pretty easy to disable Chrome extensions..