Focus Bear review - blocking Reddit for good

I’ll admit, Reddit has been my biggest kryptonite when it comes to productivity.

On good days where I’m feeling high energy and productive, I rarely feel the need to visit it or other time-wasting sites or apps. 

But on days where I wake tired or have setbacks are when I can default into mindful scrolling and procrastinate the time away.

For this reason, I’ve always found it helpful to install app blocking to increase the friction to get to those sites and apps. 

Like sure I could enter an  impossibly long passcode to unlock the blocker but that’s a pain in the butt, so I might as well let the urge pass and get back to something more positive.

This has worked pretty well - but the biggest challenge has been having to install multiple browser extensions and try to somehow keep the block-lists in sync.

For example - I could browse Reddit on my main browser Firefox on my laptop or PC, or Chrome which I sometimes need to use, or Edge etc... 

I end up with a bunch of different browser extensions. When a new site or app comes along that distracts (hello Threads!), and I have to update them all.

‍FocusBear recently launched, I thought I’d give it a shot to solve this problem:

I installed the app on Windows, created an account, then added Reddit.com to the universal blocklist (which works even when you’re not in a Focus Block - their term for working sessions when you’re meant to stay away from distractions):

Then, I tried to access Reddit on my primary browser, Firefox and got this pretty clear “nuh-uh”:

Which is exactly what I was after!

Then I tried to open up Chrome and get in that way, and got the same blocking:

That already is a step up on my current setup with different browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Edge.

There’s a lot of other features - set morning and evening routines, micro breaks (great for resting eyes) which I’ll be checking out later together with their mobile apps, but even just for the core site blocking it’s proving very useful so far!