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Is there a good MacOS¹/Unix-y way to automate this? (I’m guessing a crontab that swaps two versions of /etc/hosts is my best option but maybe there’s something more elegant?)

1. I’m aware of ScreenTime, but it’s too easily overridden.



I use HeyFocus: https://heyfocus.com/

I bought it when it was a 1 time $20 purchase. You can define what times you want to block (Monday - Friday from 9am-5pm, for example). You can also lock preferences for when the Focus is active so you can’t change it. There’s also options for adding breaks.

It’s worked well for me. I know a little about myself and I need something like this to force me from being distracted. Whenever I find a new site, I add it to the list of blocked sites.

You can also block apps, or whitelist sites so everything except a few sites is blocked.


I have a directory with a restricted hosts file and an empty one, and two aliases that just copy one of them to /etc

I can turn it off whenever I want with one commandline, but it’s enough to keep me from falling into the rabbit hole accidentally




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