The real cost of distraction is not time. It is recovery time.

Most people measure distraction by minutes lost.

I think that misses the more expensive part.

The real cost is recovery time.

You open a feed for two minutes.
Then you close it.
But your brain does not close it with you.

A little residue sticks around.
You are back in your code editor, but part of your attention is still on the video, the post, the comment, the argument, the next thing you almost clicked.

That recovery cost is what kept messing up my days.
Not one huge binge.
A hundred tiny context leaks.

As a solo developer, that hurts more than people realize.
When you only have a few real hours to build, every reset matters.
Losing ten minutes is annoying.
Losing the next thirty minutes of clean focus is brutal.

That pushed me toward building Monk Mode.
I did not want another tool that just yelled "be disciplined."
I wanted something that made deep work easier by removing the most attention-hijacking layer: the feed itself.

That distinction matters.
A lot of the time I still need the app.
I just do not need the algorithm inside the app pulling me sideways.

So the product idea became simple:
use the tool
skip the trap

That has become one of my bigger solo dev lessons too.
A product gets more useful when it matches the actual failure mode.
My failure mode was not "I accidentally opened my laptop."
It was "I opened one thing for a valid reason and got dragged into everything around it."

If you are trying to protect your focus, do not just ask:
"how much time did I lose?"

Ask:
"how long did it take before my brain was fully back?"

That number is usually way worse.

If you want to check out Monk Mode: https://mac.monk-mode.lifestyle