My two biggest productivity killers are YouTube and Chess. Once I’m on either of them, it’s hard to get out: YouTube sucks me into a spiral of recommendations and chess baits me into playing too many games. I’ve tried using extensions to block them but it’s too easy to just go on incognito mode to bypass. The problem is, in that moment, there isn’t much willpower to resist.

But a few days ago, I realised BlockSite lets you redirect a blocked website to another page of your choosing. I thought for a while and decided on this:

It’s just a simple Notion page that took one minute to set up. But whenever I land on this, I get a fat dose of momento mori. The urge to waste my time goes away and I look to more productive behaviours like reading or cleaning my room. I’ve wasted barely any time on YouTube and chess since.

Most of us have activities that eat away our soul but for whatever reason, we do them anyway. My hypothesis is that we just need an extra dose of willpower to help us overcome the temptation in that moment. For destructive behaviour on the internet, this landing page seems to work for me.