FocusOne - Block Sites, Filter YouTube Channels, Schedule Focus

Description

Protect your time. Block distracting websites, filter YouTube channels, and set strict schedules to do your best work. FocusOne is a free site blocker and productivity extension for Chrome that lets you block sites, filter YouTube channels, and automatically schedule your focus sessions — all 100% on your device with zero tracking. Block websites that waste your time. Keep the ones that don't. FocusOne is the only website blocker that also lets you filter YouTube by specific channel, remove clickbait thumbnails, and lock itself so you can't cheat during a focus session. If you have ever opened YouTube to watch one tutorial and looked up 40 minutes later watching something completely unrelated, or opened Reddit just to check something quickly and lost an hour in the Popular feed, or started your workday meaning to focus and somehow ended up scrolling Twitter instead — FocusOne was built for exactly that. Not because you are weak. But because those feeds were designed by teams of engineers whose entire job is to keep you there. You are not losing a fair fight. You are losing a rigged one. FocusOne puts engineering on your side. BLOCK ANY WEBSITE — DURING FOCUS OR ALWAYS Add any site to your blocklist and choose how strictly you want it blocked. You can set a site to be blocked only during your scheduled focus sessions, so you can still browse freely outside of work hours. Or you can set it to always blocked, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no exceptions. The choice is yours — but once focus mode is active, that choice is locked in. To make setup fast, FocusOne includes ready-made bundles so you can block sites by category in a single click — no need to hunt down individual URLs. Social Media covers the main social feeds, infinite scroll timelines, and status checkers — 10 sites added instantly. Short-Form Video blocks the high-dopamine vertical video feeds designed to trap your attention — 5 sites. News and Media covers breaking news sites, political commentary pages, and doomscrolling outlets — 11 sites. Streaming and Gaming blocks video streaming services, game streams, and gaming portals — 12 sites. Shopping and Deals blocks impulse shopping portals, deal aggregators, and online marketplaces — 9 sites. Forums and Discussion blocks the infinite threads, rabbit holes, and comment drama — 8 more sites. Click once. Block them all. No typing required. Every site you add shows two buttons side by side: During Focus and Always. This is the most important design choice in FocusOne. Most website blockers treat blocking as binary — blocked or not blocked. FocusOne lets you be specific. Block Reddit only when you are working but keep it available in the evening. Block TikTok permanently. Block Instagram on weekdays but not weekends. Your blocklist, your rules. YOUTUBE SHIELDS — KEEP WHAT MATTERS, REMOVE WHAT DOESN'T This is the feature that makes FocusOne different from every other site blocker and website blocker on the Chrome Web Store. Blocking YouTube completely is not always the answer. If you are a developer, a student, a designer, or anyone who uses YouTube for tutorials and learning, blocking the whole site removes the tool you actually need. The real problem is not YouTube — it is what YouTube puts around the video you came to watch. YouTube Shields let you keep the platform working while removing the specific parts built to pull you off-task. You can whitelist specific YouTube channels you actually want to watch. Add the channels that teach you things and matter to your work. Once your allowlist is set, every other channel's content gets hidden — you can still search and find what you need, but the algorithm stops pushing random creators at you. This is YouTube filtered by you, not by an algorithm that benefits from keeping you watching as long as possible. Beyond the channel allowlist, you get individual toggles for each distraction layer: Block YouTube Shorts everywhere they appear — on the shelf, in the tab, and in the player itself. This is one of the most-requested features in any YouTube productivity extension, and FocusOne blocks Shorts completely with a single toggle. Shorts are the fastest-growing source of accidental time loss on YouTube because they autoplay and loop. One toggle removes them from everywhere they show up. Hide the watch page recommendations and sidebar. This is the column of videos on the right side of every YouTube video that exists for one purpose only: to pull you away from the video you chose to watch and onto a video the algorithm chose for you. Remove it. Hide comments. The comments section on YouTube is one of the most effective ways to spend 20 minutes when you meant to spend two. Hide it and the video gets 100% of your attention. Hide the home page feed. The YouTube home page is a fully engineered distraction engine — every tile is algorithmically chosen to be maximally clickable, not maximally useful to you. Hide the feed and you are left with a search bar. Now YouTube is a tool, not a trap. Hide channel feeds and profile pages so browsing a creator's back catalog does not turn into a two-hour session. Hide YouTube community posts — the feed of text and image posts creators publish between videos — which functions like a social media feed inside a video platform. Anti-Clickbait Mode. This is the detail most people notice first when they turn it on. FocusOne converts all YouTube thumbnails to grayscale and applies a blur. The result is that before you click any video, you have to read the title. The title tells you whether the video is actually useful to you. The thumbnail — which is designed to be emotionally provocative and visually irresistible — no longer makes the decision for you. You start clicking based on what you actually want to learn, not based on which thumbnail triggered a reaction. It sounds like a small thing. It changes everything. X / TWITTER SHIELDS — REMOVE THE MACHINE, KEEP THE NETWORK Twitter and X are valuable for following people in your field, seeing what is being discussed, and sharing work. They are also one of the most effective doomscrolling machines ever built, because the For You feed is designed to show you content that provokes a reaction — agreement, outrage, curiosity — rather than content from people you chose to follow. X Shields remove the mechanism without removing the platform. Hide Trending Now and What's Happening. These panels exist to pull you into conversations and news cycles you did not come to the platform to find. Hide them and the platform becomes quieter. Hide the Explore tab. The Explore tab is a curated feed of trending content specifically designed to show you things outside your existing interests that the algorithm thinks will keep you engaged. Hide it. Disable the For You algorithmic timeline. This switches your default feed from algorithmically chosen content back to the people you actually chose to follow, in reverse chronological order. Your network, not the algorithm's picks. REDDIT SHIELDS — SEARCH WITHOUT THE SPIRAL Reddit has some of the best communities on the internet for learning, for finding answers, and for connecting with people who share your specific interests. It also has a Popular feed and an All feed that function as infinite content engines — entirely divorced from the communities you chose to join, showing you whatever gets the most clicks across the entire platform. Reddit Shields remove the parts that cause the spiral while leaving the parts that are actually useful. Hide Popular and All global feeds. You can still go directly to any subreddit you know and want. You can still search. You lose nothing except the algorithmic browsing mode. Hide recommended communities and infinite scroll. The sidebar and recommended community panels on Reddit are designed to show you new communities you did not ask to join, which pull you into new browsing loops. Remove them. FOCUS SCHEDULES — SET IT ONCE, IT FIRES AUTOMATICALLY You do not have to remember to turn FocusOne on every day. Set a focus schedule once and it arms itself automatically when your time window starts. You can create weekly schedules — a work hours block from Monday to Friday, for example — or date-specific sessions for a project deadline, an exam period, or any specific day you need to be fully focused. Each focus event arms automatically when its time window opens. You do not have to open the extension, click anything, or remember anything. Your schedule runs whether or not you think about it. You can create multiple focus events with different names and different site settings. A morning deep work session might block everything. An afternoon reading block might only block social media. An evening study session might block video platforms but keep reference sites open. Full flexibility, fully automatic. STRICT LOCK MODE — NOT YOUR CHOICE ANYMORE This is the feature that makes FocusOne different from every other website blocker, site blocker, and focus mode extension on the Chrome Web Store. Most blockers let you turn them off. Most site blockers give you a way out — a password that you know, an override you can click after a five-second delay, an emergency unlock. Those features feel reassuring when you install them and destroy the blocker's effectiveness every time you actually need it. The moment a craving hits — the moment you actually want to check the feed — you have the ability to cancel the block, and the craving always wins. FocusOne removes that ability entirely during a focus session. Once your session is active, the blocked sites are blocked. You get one 2-minute grace period — a genuine, meaningful grace for the times you actually need it — and that is all. The session ends when the timer says it ends. Not when you decide it ends. This is not a punishment. This is the one design decision that behavioral science says actually works. Motivation rises and falls all day. Friction — real, structural, non-removable friction — does not. FocusOne does not ask your future self to be stronger than your present self. It just removes the option. CUSTOMIZE YOUR BLOCK SCREEN When FocusOne blocks a site, you do not just see a generic error page. You see a screen you designed yourself for exactly this moment. You set the main heading — the one sentence that reminds you what you are doing today and why it matters. Studying for finals. Finishing the report. Working on the product. Whatever is true for you. You set a supporting message underneath it. A line that you wrote, in advance, when you were thinking clearly, to the version of yourself who is going to be tempted. FocusOne puts your own words on the screen at the exact moment you need to read them. You choose the visual theme — from four built-in ambient animated themes or your own uploaded photo. The block screen can look like whatever helps you refocus. This matters more than it sounds: the moment of interception — the moment FocusOne catches you heading somewhere you did not mean to go — is also the moment you have the best chance of redirecting. What you see in that moment changes what you do next. FOCUS ANALYTICS — FREE PRODUCTIVITY TRACKING, FULLY UNLOCKED, 100% ON DEVICE FocusOne shows you exactly where your time is going. Every metric is computed locally on your device — nothing is sent to a server, nothing is tracked, and nothing is visible to anyone but you. You can see your total focus time lifetime, today's focus hours, your current streak in days, and the number of distraction attempts FocusOne blocked. That last number is the one most people find most surprising. Most people expect it to be low. It is not low. You can see a weekly trend chart showing your focus hours day by day over the past seven days. This is the data that shows whether what you are doing is working. Most people who track this for two weeks start to see patterns they had no idea existed — the days they focus longest, the times of day when distractions spike, the weeks when something is off. All of this is free. Every feature in FocusOne is free to use right now — the full blocklist, every bundle, all three Shields, strict lock mode, the analytics dashboard, the custom block screen. No upgrade required. ZERO SURVEILLANCE — YOUR DATA STAYS ON YOUR COMPUTER Because FocusOne has to check the URL of every site you visit to know whether to block it, we want to be completely clear about what we do with that access. FocusOne makes every decision on your device. The URLs you visit, the sites you block, the focus sessions you run, the analytics your dashboard shows — none of it is sent to any server. None of it is stored anywhere outside your browser. None of it is visible to us or to anyone else. We can not see it because it never leaves your computer. This is not a default-on privacy setting you can adjust. There is no setting to adjust. There is no server to receive the data. We built it this way on purpose and it is described clearly in every part of the extension — the sidebar says "100% On-Device" and "Zero Surveillance" on every screen, not because it is a good marketing line, but because it is the accurate description of how the code works. BUILT TO BE UNINSTALLED FocusOne exists for one purpose: to help you build enough focus discipline that you eventually do not need software to enforce it anymore. The feeds, the shorts, the infinite scroll, the For You timeline — they are engineered habits. They are not weaknesses. They were designed by people whose job it was to make them hard to stop. FocusOne is engineering that works in the other direction: every blocked session, every intercepted distraction, every day you finish with more done than you expected builds something the algorithm cannot build for you. The goal is not to use FocusOne forever. The goal is to use it until the focus is yours. Install it free. Use it as long as you need to. And when you realize you do not need it anymore — that is the win. Free to install. Free to use. No account required. No personal data collected. Works on Chrome, Brave, and all Chromium-based browsers.

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