A website blocker for students

Why a short delay is enough

The pull during study is boredom and avoidance rather than craving. A fifteen-minute wait is longer than the discomfort that triggered the reach, so the reach simply stops paying off.

A long cool-down would be counterproductive here. You will need to look something up, and a tool you resent is a tool you will uninstall in deadline week.

A setup that survives the term

• Schedule, do not block permanently.Study hours on weekdays, off at the weekend, so the rules stay credible.
• Keep research open.Block feeds, not search engines, documentation or your library.
• Include the respectable distractions.Group chats and email cost more study time than the obvious offenders.
• Cover the phone too.Blocking the laptop and studying next to an open phone achieves nothing.

The distractions that do not look like distractions

Nobody needs telling that scrolling costs study time. The ones that quietly cost more are the ones that feel like part of the work, or like something you are obliged to keep up with.

• The course group chat.Genuinely useful about once a week and permanently open the rest of the time. It is also the hardest to block, because muting it feels like falling behind. Schedule it into two or three windows a day instead.
• Study-with-me videos and productivity content.Watching somebody else work is not working, and the platform hosting it is not going to stop at one video.
• Research that stopped being research.Six tabs deep into a tangent you opened to check one date. The tell is that you could not say what the original question was.
• Reorganising your notes.No blocker catches this one. It is worth naming because it absorbs the same avoidance the feeds do, and it looks productive enough to go unchallenged for hours.

The library and your room are different problems

Studying in a shared or public space already supplies a mild version of what a blocker provides: the chance somebody glances at your screen. That is why the same person concentrates in a library and not in their room, and it is not a discipline difference.

If you mostly work in your room, you are replacing that missing friction entirely with software, so the setup has to be stricter than it would need to be in a library. If you mostly work in the library, a lighter schedule covering the walk home and the evening is usually enough.

Either way the phone matters more than the laptop. In a library it is the only unmonitored screen you have, which is precisely why it becomes the one you reach for.

Deadline week is the real test

This is when people disable everything, and it is exactly when the blocking is worth most. Set the schedule so it is generous enough that you never need to switch it off entirely.

If you find yourself fighting the rules every day, they are wrong. Adjust them in a calm moment rather than in the middle of a panic.

An all-nighter is the specific case worth planning for in advance. A schedule that ends at midnight becomes an unlocked machine at the hour you have least judgement left, so if you know you work late in deadline week, extend the window before the week rather than during it.