Building Whiiteroom — Part 1(How it started)

(Live Website: https://www.whiiteroom.com)
We all know that feeling.
You sit down to study or work, telling yourself, "Today, I'll finally focus."
Then you open YouTube for a tutorial.
A recommended video catches your eye.
"Just one video."
One becomes five.
Before you know it, you've spent hours procrastinating.
Or maybe you opened your phone or laptop to do something productive... only to end up scrolling social media.
We've all been there.
I was no different.
It got to the point where I started searching for something that could stop me from distracting myself.
Not something that relied on motivation or self-control. I'd watched countless productivity and self-help videos, but none solved the actual problem.
I wanted something that would only let me do productive things during a focus session.
Since I spend most of my time on my laptop, I started looking for desktop solutions. Eventually, I came across tools like Cold Turkey and FocusMe.
They were good at what they were built for—but they still weren't what I needed.
The biggest limitation was that they asked me what I wanted to block.
The problem was I couldn't possibly list every distraction. And even when I blocked an app or website, it blocked the entire thing. That didn't work because I use platforms like YouTube to learn. The same platform that taught me the most also distracted me the most.
I wanted the opposite.
Instead of asking, "What should I block?", I wanted it to ask, "What do you need?"
I wanted to tell my computer what I needed and have everything else blocked automatically.
YouTube was the biggest example. I use it for programming tutorials, university lectures, and educational content every day.
The problem wasn't YouTube itself.
The problem was everything around it—recommendations, Shorts, unrelated videos, and endless rabbit holes.
So did the rest of my workflow.
I needed VS Code, GitHub, documentation, PDFs, and a handful of websites.
I wanted a workspace where only those things were available while everything else stayed out of the way until my session ended.
No constant decisions.
No negotiating with myself.
Just a computer dedicated to the work I'd committed to doing.
After weeks of searching, I couldn't find anything that worked the way I imagined.
That's when I decided to build it myself.
Ironically, this idea first came to me back in 2021...
...but I procrastinated on building an app to stop procrastination. 😅
For years, I kept telling myself, "I'll start someday." Or wondering, "Is it even possible for me to build something like this?"
I didn't know where to begin.
I wasn't sure if I had the skills.
But 8 months ago, I finally started. I had no idea how I'd build it, what it would look like, or what features it'd have. All I had was a blurry vision of what I wanted it to become.
That blurry idea has grown into a product nearing completion.
It's called Whiiteroom.