Why I BLOCK all BROWSERS!
At least on my work devices (Or at least at the time I am working)
What is a browser? It is a piece of software that is the pinnacle of access to the wealth of information that is, was or will be. Many PCs like the Chromebook justify the fact that a browser is the only thing you could be requiring at all, at any time on your PC.
How I look at it however, is as a potential for losing track of what you are doing at any point in time, and then getting lost on something totally un-related to what you were supposed to be doing. Browsers are the gateway to News, social media, youtube and what not. Imagine the cognitive load this takes up in your mind. Random questions can pop up and become immediately urgent.
You can read about blocking softwares in this post. I have also discussed previously about cognitive load, and how the ‘all-screen’ devices overload our minds with options, to tap here, tap there, and suck up all the usable mental energy we could put in our work. By giving us so many options and overloading our minds with decisions we have to continuously make. Even PewDiePie, the most subscribed youtuber, talks about it frequently.
However if you remove that option from your list of tasks you can do at any given point in time, you are doing yourself a favour. However, that is scary. What if I block it and then I need to address an urgent question or search query? Well here are some much better options that can work, at least temporarily:
Download Claude or ChatGPT and they will search it for you.
Need to access a YouTube Video? Get it’s link from AI and then use Youtube-dl, a Youtube video Downloader.
If you need to access something like Substack or a website you frequently use, download it’s desktop app.
If no desktop app for your go-to website exists, you will most probably be able to find it’s desktop app on WebCatalog or you can make it yourself via Fluid.
Subscribe to RSS feeds and access them in apps that organise that better. My go-to app for this is the Readwise Reader.
Let me know in the comments if these still don’t solve your use-case.
Once you download that Youtube lecture/tutorial that is an hour or more long, you are not only increasing your chances of completing it, you can also go through it again and again. Online, you rarely open a link twice.
I am also a firm believer in hoarding all the relevant data I require for work, through torrents or more ways to take data offline, like wget to download entire websites.
Finally, as offline models like DeepSeek-R1 improve, we may be able to keep models relevant for our work offline, and may not even need an internet connection. I talk about these offline models in this post.
The very next thing I would like to write about is email, but legends like Cal Newport have already discussed that extensively.