Blocking Distractions With StayFocusd
I installed StayFocusd after one too many “I’ll just check YouTube for a minute” spirals that turned into… well, you know how it goes. It sits quietly most of the time until you hit a blocked site and then boom — big blue screen telling you to get back to work. The first time it happened I actually laughed and went back to my doc right away 🙂
Setting it up is slightly more fiddly than it looks. You click the extension icon and start adding websites to the blocked list. But here’s the thing: you can’t just type *facebook* — you need the full URL pattern. I found out because facebook.com worked, but m.facebook.com was still sneaking through when I clicked links in Messenger. Once I added the mobile subdomain too, disaster averted. You can also pick a maximum time you’re allowed on distraction sites per day — I set mine to 15 minutes and I swear that ticking countdown timer at the top corner is more effective than coffee.
It is ruthless, though. If you block a site for the day, there’s no “just five more minutes” button. You can go into settings and change it, but they make you click through an annoying series of confirm messages. That’s the point — forcing you to feel just enough friction that you give up and go back to actual work.
Cleaning Up Tabs With OneTab
My Chrome right now has… let me check… 36 open tabs. That’s actually better than last week. When my brain starts buzzing with too many things and I realize half the tabs have been untouched for hours, I hit the OneTab extension icon and everything collapses into a neat single list in one tab. It literally turns each open page into a bullet point with the page title and URL. You can restore them individually or all at once.
First time I used it, I panicked for about five seconds because I thought it had closed and lost them all. But nope — they’re sitting safely in a list. If you restart your computer, that list stays exactly as it was. And if you really have something you want to keep forever, you can lock that OneTab list so it won’t get cleared when you make a new one.
It also claims to save memory because Chrome doesn’t keep all those pages loaded anymore. I don’t have a RAM tracker running to confirm, but my laptop fan definitely quieted down after dumping 40+ tabs into OneTab ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Writing Without Distractions Using FocusWriter
FocusWriter isn’t actually a Chrome extension — it’s a standalone app — but there’s an in-browser alternative called Writer that behaves similarly. You open it and you get a completely blank page that fills your screen. No tabs, no bookmarks bar, just the words you type. I had to remember how to actually format without relying on Markdown preview or Google Docs’ constant underline feedback.
It’s surprisingly relaxing once you stop twitching toward your mouse every 10 seconds. I’ve started opening it in a separate Chrome profile (this is a little trick I use to isolate work contexts) so that none of my usual extensions or bookmarks are visible. That way, even if muscle memory takes over and I try to hop to Gmail, there’s nothing logged in.
One catch — these writing tools usually auto-save locally or in their own account system, and that’s it. If your browser crashes, you can lose the last chunk of text. I learned the hard way, so now before I close the tab, I manually copy everything into my notes just in case.
Keeping Track of Task Lists With Todoist
I’ve been through at least six to-do list apps and I keep wandering back to Todoist because it does just enough but doesn’t feel bloated. The Chrome extension version is brilliant when I’m in the middle of researching something — I see a task, hit the extension icon, type it in with a due date, and it’s saved instantly in my list.
The part new users often miss is the natural language parsing. You can literally type “Write report Tuesday” and it sets the due date to next Tuesday automatically. Same with “every Friday” for repeating tasks. But that magic only works if you don’t overcomplicate the wording — “by end of next week” is vague enough that it won’t know what you mean. So I stick to short, date-specific phrasing.
One small annoyance: clicking into the extension while you’re offline will sometimes just hang instead of caching the task. If that happens, I open the main app in another tab and paste it there. Not pretty, but it works.
Pausing Notifications Using Momentum
Momentum is technically a new tab replacement that gives you a nice photo, the time, and a focus prompt for the day. But for me the magic is in the very subtle mental shift — every time I open a new tab to mindlessly browse somewhere, I’m met instead by this big friendly reminder of what I said I’m working on.
You can add focus tasks right on the screen, and it will sit there all day glaring at you until you check it off. It also hides Chrome’s usual row of recently visited sites, which is often where I’d end up clicking my way back into a rabbit hole. There’s a paid upgrade for integrations with tools like Asana or Trello, but honestly I find the free version enough to nudge me back on track.
Every once in a while the background fails to load and it’s just a white page with the text all bunched in the corner — probably my flaky internet. Weirdly, even that awkward blank page is enough of an interruption to stop me from loading Reddit.
Reducing Endless Scrolling With News Feed Eradicator
This one is brutal in the best way. You install News Feed Eradicator, tell it which sites’ feeds to wipe out, and poof — Facebook and Twitter timelines just vanish. In their place you get a single motivational quote. First time I opened Facebook after activating it, I thought my account had broken until I remembered turning it on.
Technically the content is still there, but the extension hides it with CSS (the styling that controls how pages look). Clicking directly to someone’s profile still works, and you can visit groups or pages normally. But the endless scroll homepage is gone, so you can’t accidentally lose half an hour to “just checking.”
One funny side effect: when sites redesign their layout, sometimes it breaks the extension and the feed reappears completely unstyled. That happened to me once and it actually looked so bad that I closed the tab faster than if it had been working as intended 😛
Organizing Reading With Pocket
I use Pocket as a sort of pressure release for my brain when I find an article I want to read but don’t have time right now. Instead of keeping dozens of half-read articles open, I click the Pocket extension and it stashes the link in my account. Later, usually on my tablet on the couch, I sift through and read them.
Something beginners often trip over is tagging. You can save articles with specific tags right from the extension pop-up — I have tags like “work”, “automation”, “funny” to group articles. Without tags, the list becomes a giant scroll and you forget why you saved half the stuff. The sync works in the background so you don’t have to keep the Chrome tab open, but if your internet dies mid-save, it will just vanish silently and you’ll never see that page again.
They have a recommended articles feed too, but I actually avoid it — the whole point is to curate my own intake, not find even more things to distract me.
Breaking Work Into Sessions With Marinara Timer
A lot of people use the Pomodoro method — work for about 25 minutes, break for about 5, repeat. Marinara Timer bakes this right into a little Chrome extension. You hit start, set your work session, and you’ll hear a chime when it’s break time.
What’s great is you can choose between the default Pomodoro timing, a custom repeat schedule, or a one-off countdown. I tend to set weird values like 42 minutes because that’s just when I naturally feel done with a task. The extension runs in the background so you don’t have to leave the timer tab open.
One bug I ran into — if Chrome updates while the timer is running, sometimes the chime doesn’t play. The timer keeps going, but you won’t hear anything. I learned to glance at the little countdown icon instead of trusting the sound entirely.
Between this, StayFocusd, and OneTab, I finally have a setup where distractions have to fight really hard to get through.