Show HN: Focus Firewall – a realistic distraction blocker for Mac
focusfirewall.com
I started building this app (for Mac) out of necessity to avoid distractions (like twitter, yt, hn) during working hours, especially now that I'm WFH/remote/solo and lacking the structure of a corp job schedule.
I was having a hard time because a yt video or a twitter link visit would almost always becomes 2 videos or 5 mins of scrolling. There are a bunch of smart people working against you and trying to keep you in.
Apart from the time we waste, we also spend our focus/attention battery charge. We get bombarded with info/content and we can only process so much every day. This aspect is more qualitative and a little harder to measure, but I think it also does have a significant impact on how our days go.
Just like food, we also need to care for our "online diet".
Before working on it, I tried other apps for a few months and none really stuck. They were either too analytical ("look how bad your browsing habits are") or too strict ("block everything password that only your S.O. knows"). I also didn't like solutions that needed browser extensions everywhere, nor solutions that uploaded your browsing history to some cloud (gross).
Ultimately what worked was just editing /etc/hosts and pointing twitter.com to localhost. Of course I can just open the file and unblock things, but just that added friction was enough to think about it twice "damn it, gotta edit the file...". This often made me give up getting my twitter/yt fix.
I ended up creating a dumb switch in the menu bar that you can "turn distractions off" = starts blocking distracting things. It looks like the internet is down just for that website. I also made it autostart everyday 9to5 so that I don't have to think about it.
And of course, it's not strict at all. You can turn it off anytime and you can take breaks. Also if you're curious, our early beta users seem to continue using the app even though you can turn it off anytime – they end up using pauses, which helps manage how much time they wanna spend.
Wanted to share it with y'all and would love to hear your thoughts/feedback/comments!