Editing Your hosts File to Help Focus

I’ve recently decided to scale back some of my social media and other time-wasting activities.

Initially I was trying to do this with browser plugins to block specific sites. Unfortunately, I was too clever for my own good and removed those plugins or opened incognito windows whenever I wanted to, say watch Youtube or browse Twitter.

So I tried to think about how I could make this even harder for myself and decided to change my hosts file to redirect urls to another IP effectively blocking all my site vices. Here’s how I did it.