I kept trying the obvious fix for distraction.
Delete the app.
Instagram, X, YouTube, whatever was eating attention that week.
It worked for a few days.
Then I would reinstall the app because I still needed parts of it.
DMs. Search. Links people sent me. Checking a profile. Uploading something for work.
That was the pattern that finally clicked for me.
I did not actually want to block the whole app.
I wanted to block the part that turned a 30 second check into 30 minutes gone.
Usually that meant the feed.
The weird thing about a lot of distraction tools is that they force an all or nothing choice.
Either keep the app and accept the scroll spiral, or block the app completely and lose the useful parts too.
That never matched real life for me.
Most of these apps are a bundle of two different things:
- utility
- compulsion
Utility is messages, search, pages, event info, uploads, and direct links.
Compulsion is the endless feed that is always ready to hand you another thing.
Those are not the same problem, so they should not have the same solution.
That is why I built Monk Mode.
I wanted a tool that removes the feed without removing the rest of the app.
Not a lecture about discipline.
Not another timer yelling at me.
Just a cleaner environment where the most exploitative part is gone.
That framing changed how I think about focus products in general.
A lot of productivity software is built around heroic self-control.
Set a rule. Resist temptation. Stay strong.
I think that works badly when the environment is doing everything possible to make you fail.
A better approach is to make the bad default harder.
If there is no feed to fall into, you do not need to win a dramatic internal battle every time you open the app.
You just do the useful thing and leave.
That has been the core product lesson for me:
The best focus tool is often not the one that blocks the most.
It is the one that removes the specific trap that keeps stealing your time.
For me, that trap was rarely the whole internet.
It was the feed.
So I built Monk Mode around that idea.
If you have ever deleted a social app, reinstalled it a week later, and felt annoyed that the only options were total abstinence or total chaos, that is exactly the gap I wanted to solve.
Monk Mode is here if you want to see it:
https://mac.monk-mode.lifestyle
Still building it as a solo dev, still learning, but this is one product where the reason I made it is extremely personal.
Because I was very tired of losing focus to software that pretends to be a tool while acting like a slot machine.
Top comments (0)