I didn't believe it either, so I checked twice. Over thirty days, my browser history showed 491 visits to LinkedIn. Not to post. Not to reply to anyone. Not to apply for anything. Just… the feed. On reflex. In the gap between two thoughts, my hand would already be typing l-i-n-k before I'd decided to.
That number did something to me. 491 times is roughly sixteen a day. If each detour costs even two minutes to climb back out of, that's a full work week, gone, to a feed I never once meant to open.
The blockers didn't stick
I'd tried the site blockers. All of them have the same fatal flaw: they block the whole domain. Block linkedin.com and you also lose your messages, your job replies, the recruiter waiting on you. So the moment something real came up, I'd whitelist it "just for a second" — and thirty-five minutes later I was three months deep in a stranger's promotion post.
All-or-nothing never held, because these sites aren't only a slot machine. They're also a tool. The two are welded together, and every blocker made me choose between them.
The thing that actually clicked
It was never the site. It was the feed. The infinite-scroll surface — linkedin.com/feed, reddit.com/r/all, YouTube Shorts, x.com/home. The messages, the search, the specific pages I looked up on purpose were never the problem. I just needed a way to kill the scroll and keep the tool.
So I built it. Refocus blocks the feed and leaves everything else alive. It adds a night schedule for the 1am spiral, a daily limit when I want a hard cap, and a focus timer for real work. It runs entirely in the browser — no account, no server, nothing about my day leaving my machine. And it's free, because a focus tool that harvests your attention data is a bad joke.
Since I stopped trying to cut myself off from tools I actually need, my usage fell off a cliff. Turns out the trick wasn't more willpower. It was aiming at the right thing.
⏱ Add Refocus to Chrome — free
If you've ever blocked a whole site and unblocked it five minutes later because you needed one real thing from it — this was built for you.