Like many, I struggle with digital distractions. Opening the browser and typing ‘re’(ddit) is burned into my fingertips. Before I know it, an hour has passed and I’m feeling horribly guilty.

In the past, I’ve used the StayFocusd chrome extension, which, while a massive improvement over nothing, was still too easy to circumvent by switching browsers, going incognito, or switching Chrome users.

Enter the hosts file, which on Mac OS X & Linux can be found in /etc/hosts. It allows you to map domains to an ip address, which can be effectively utilized to block distracting sites.

Putting 127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com in /etc/hosts will map Reddit to your local machine’s address, i.e. nowhere.

The problem is that it can be a bit of a pain to type sudo mvim /etc/hosts then (un)comment out the sites, then save & quit.

I was initially hesitant to write a script to automate this since that would make it as easy to unblock sites as it was to block them … then I realized the script didn’t need to unblock anything! So I wrote a simple script that uncomments all of the sites in my /etc/hosts file (thus blocking them) and put it in my path. If I want to unblock them, I have to manually edit /etc/hosts. But reblocking them is a simple sudo block away.

The final stage in the plan is to create a job that executes that script nightly, so that when I wake up, Reddit, HN and co. are blocked, hopefully stymying my habit of visiting Reddit or HN first thing in the morning.