Live4Awesomeness: Productivity Tips #1: How to block the websites you visit often?

I know how you have been listening to me on productivity hacks and on improving your work-life balance. Today I have something to confess. I recently fell into a bad habit of wasting time and money. The habit formed when I started listening to business news and started reading articles related to stock markets. Then I fell into the trap of checking these websites very often and wasting time reading articles too many times a day.

I clocked my time wasted to be around 2 hours per day which was not I wanted exactly. I wanted to put a stop to this shitty behavior and get my time back. What did I do?

The solution that I came up with is what I have written below.

Solution 1 - Use a chrome plugin available in your chrome marketplace

The famous chrome plugin seems to be Block Site to accomplish the same is (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site-website-blocke/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh).

All you have to do is:

1. Add the chrome plugin by visiting the website above
2. The icon appears next to the url bar in the chrome. 
3. Visit the website you can to block and click on the red icon to start blocking the website.

This works like magic and there is an option to sync between android too.

Solution 2 - Use your own local chrome plugin (I chose this)

I wrote a simple script for the chrome plugin and this script blocks the websites you mention. I have put it as open source for others to use. The source is here: https://github.com/gten/productivity-increaser-chrome-block

You can download the files and add the chrome from your local machine to start blocking the websites given in the background.js.

This might seem a little advanced but for those who want to customize the script, this might be a great answer. For others, looking for simple solutions, choose the first solution.

Solution 3 - Rewrite your /etc/hosts

All nix machines like MacOS, Linux, Ubuntu have a hosts files to check for ip addresses related to the domain urls. If you overwrite them, you can point the websites you want blocked to go local ip like 127.0.0.1 which will inherently stop you from visiting these websites.

Thanks for reading this article. I hope I made a little change in your daily productivity and please leave a comment if you want to share something or ask me something.