Announcing a tool to help you get your focus back in 2020

Our focus is under assault. Over $100 billion was spent on online advertising in 2018 alone — all trying to distract us from the things that really matter.

One of my New Years’ resolutions is to be more focused — both in how I live my life as a whole, and how I spend each minute.

To that end, I’ve created a Chrome extension to help me be more focused when using the Internet, by slowing down and removing color from distracting sites.

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

I’ve tried tools that totally block distracting websites before — but it’s hard to completely block distracting websites, especially when they’re sometimes valuable (for example, I consider both email and Facebook Messenger distracting — but too valuable to give up entirely).

Instead, I thought I’d try something new — instead of blocking them, making them less engaging. Research has shown that slowing down a website by just a few seconds can decrease pageviews by 20% or more. On top of that, making websites greyscale dramatically reduces their addictiveness.

The extension I built lets you slow down and desaturate distracting websites so that they’re less addicting, without having to totally give up on the Internet. Plus, the extension lets you customize every aspect to fit your preferences, including the sites affected, loading delay, loading message and how much color is removed.

Hopefully you’ll find my new Get Your Focus Back Chrome extension useful. Did I mention it’s free, open source, and has zero tracking, analytics or ads?

Happy New Year!

P.S. looking for more tools to improve your focus? I also highly recommend Todoist and Freedom