I've read James Clear "
Atomic Habits" book and I would highly recommend it for anybody who is trying to be more productive during the day or accomplish a goal. There is so much I like about this book but I'll leave that there for today.
So part of this book, it talks about creating an environment in which you can not fall into bad habits. Will power is overrated. Creating an environment in which you can't fall into bad habits is the key.
So in that regard, I've wasted more hours than I care to admit watching youtube videos and scrolling through reddit. Now you could use a browser extension like blocksite, but that is selling all your clickstream data so i wouldn't recommend it. And it only blocks it in one browser, so you can open another browser and look at it there.
So here is how to do it:
Add the following to your hosts file
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
and that's it. Youtube is now blocked, so enjoy all your new found productive time.
Your hosts file is usually located at c:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Sometimes i had to remove this line, to load youtube for a valid work reason and I would forget to block it again. You can use windows scheduler to copy over a blocked hosts every 5 minutes to block youtube again. If you are interested in that let me know in the comments. I can do another article about that.
