A distraction or procrastination blocker is any method, software or service that actively filtrates the internet on your devices.
Distraction and procrastination are grouped together for the sake of this article since these two phenomena have the same net effect – they waste your time and inhibit your potential.
Psychologically speaking, for your behavior to be categorized as “procrastinating,” you would have to be doing so much of something (like playing video games or watching porn) that you are not left with enough time to do the activities that would be of actual benefit.
Imagine not paying a bill because you have to be online to play Fortnite with your friends.
Imagine you want to start a blog or watch a course on programming. If you find that you can’t indulge in either of these activities for at least a few hours due to mindlessly browsing on your computer, that means you are procrastinating. On a massive scale.
Just imagine the potential of your success if you could do anything beneficial for your financial future for 4 hours every day for a full year? The potential is immense. Then imagine not having anything to do for a full day, and yet not being able to have the power of will to sit through 4 hours of YouTube videos on programming. Or registering a domain to start a website.
Distracting behavior is the main culprit of all life failures in the 21st century.
Today, money is plentiful. Success is right around the corner.
The internet has given us power and freedom that previous generations couldn’t even dream of. But the key to succeeding in this modern work era is to able to outcompete your peers. You need to be able to work more hours, and to be able to learn for more hours.
You need to block porn and remove all distracting activities on your computer.
While the internet provides ample of opportunities, the “problem” is that these opportunities are available to everyone. And although the economy is richer than ever before, it is not rich enough to be able to afford a lavish lifestyle for everyone.
That’s why they say that the richer get richer and the poor get poorer. The overall economic efficiency rewards people that can outcompete other people. And that’s where your opportunity lies.
The first step towards achieving success is to be able to have more productive work hours than the next person.
And for that to happen, you need to eliminate 90% of all wasteful distractions.
That includes video games, tv shows, movies, forums/Reddit, social media, and porn. You can indulge in these activities (except for porn) for a few hours every week, but that’s only as an anxiety reliever and to be able to be in the know about what’s popular these days. You do have to be able to have proper conversations with people, and not being in the loop about pop culture can be a big social hindrance.
The best way to quit an addiction (including an electronic one) is to quit cold turkey. That means that for the first month or two, you should aim to cut as much as possible.
That’s going to free up dozens of hours. Once you have nothing to do, your natural creativity is going to kick in and you’ll find ways to get busy. You’ll start to learn new things and begin to imagine where you want to be in the future.
You could start thinking about changing careers or progressing in your current career. You might think about ways to start your own business. You’ll think about dating and how to improve in that area. Some people will want to find their one true love, while others might want to “play the field.” It doesn’t matter as long as you are happy and growing as a person towards your goals.
What matters is that once these things get started, it’ll be very difficult for you to fall back on your old procrastinating ways.
A procrastinating pattern is usually formed during periods of isolation or depression.
Everyone has depressive moments in life, but the key to success is to not let these moments define our future.
Understand that you are not the product of your procrastination. Procrastination is just a habit you cultivated during a certain downtime in your past. You just need one month of distraction-free productive hours to get back into the game.
And once that month passes and you start seeing the seeds of your success, you won’t have a problem with falling back.
This brings us to the next point – blocking websites and other data that cause distraction.
There are different ways of blocking a website, each with its own pros and cons.
Essentially, blocking a website should work on the IP (network) level. Sending and receiving packets is how your computer communicates with other computers on the internet.
Some of these websites (like porn streaming sites) can be thought of as “bad neighborhoods.” If you imagine the internet as a two-lane road (meaning packets can come and go), a proper website blocker should block the traffic on both ways. You should be able to block all of your internet packets from reaching the parts of the internet you don’t want them to reach, while at the same time you don’t want the bad neighboorhood to be able to reach you (by advertising, for example).
The first of this analogy (about not sending traffic to parts of the internet you don’t want to visit) is called an URL filter.
Each time you type in a domain in the URL bar of your web browser (that’s the place where you can currently see the “antidopamine.com” part), you are trying to visit a certain part of the internet.
A good URL filter is going to be able to know exactly which websites to block you from visiting.
Imagine if you want to cut down on the amount of time you spend on Facebook or Instagram. A smart URL blocker can limit your allowed time on Facebook, and can completely block you from opening Facebook on any device until the time limit has been reset.
An “ad filter” is the second part of the analogy. People in the NoFap community have noted the negative effect of triggering ads.
Let’s say you’ve successfully cured yourself of a bad porn addiction. A few months down the road, you are browsing your favorite news site, and you notice an ad with a scantily clad girl. Even worse, imagine the ad is from some soft-core type dating website.
You click on the ad, one thing leads to another, and you’ve just binge masturbating five times in the course of a single night. There goes your NoFap streak.
For that reason, an URL blocker is not enough to block all distracting content. You need an inbound filter that can block all sorts of negative ads and malware.
Depending on the type of website blocker, using one can be vastly different from product to product.
If you decide on using a free browser-based website blocker, be warned that some of them may log your traffic or inject ads. They say that if you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.
On the other hand, there are professional time management and distraction blocker apps that can run passively in the background of your computer, and be able to block certain website and services once you reach a threshold.
These solutions are great, but they can be expensive and difficult to set up.
As a type of optimal middle ground that sits between these two types of website blockers is the Antidopamine Porn Blocker. The Antidopamine porn blocking service simply runs in the background on your devices and blocks both inbound and outbound traffic to porn sites. That means you can’t visit websites with porn, and porn websites can’t advertise or send packets to your computer.
It is theoretically possible to make a website blocker, as the basic code is not that difficult to implement.
You need to use an API hook to connect your operating system or web browser, then load up a list of IPs and domains you want to block and then run an active scanner to block packets from being sent and received to these websites.
This solution is not going to be technically feasible for 99% of the users out there, so it is not suggested.
If you are looking for a way to block porn (which is one of the most addictive things found online), then our in-house website blocker should suffice.
If on the other hand, you are looking for a distraction-blocking suite that can work on video games or social media sites, then you should read our list of distraction blockers found here.