Have you sat down to your computer focused on your most important project for the day, and said to yourself something like, okay, we need to get this done by the end of today?
Let's just focus on this for the next hour, and we're gonna have a fantastic day, and before you know it, a few minutes later, you find yourself wandering on YouTube or maybe social media or some other website that is distracting you or pulling you away from your most important work?
Well, in today's video, I wanna introduce you to Cold Turkey Blocker, a website and application blocker, to help you combat all of those distractions.
Hello, everyone! Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And Cold Turkey Blocker may just be the most effective and hard blocker to beat so you can focus on that most important task.
So let's take a look. Here we are within the Cold Turkey Blocker dashboard. And Cold Turkey is actually an application that you install on your computer, on your device. It's available for both PC and Macs, and also mobile devices.
And the great thing about that is that you can actually block applications, more than just websites. But today, we're gonna be looking at probably the number one culprit for most of us, and that is websites.
So to get started, what you're gonna need to do is either create a new block list, or we can use the default block list in which Cold Turkey comes with. So you have about 54 sites here in this default list called Distractions.
I'm just gonna click Edit here so you can see what's going on within this list. So if I scroll through here, you can see here's the 50 plus websites. We've got all of the major social media websites. We've got a lot of video, including Netflix and YouTube, and a lot of entertainments, and I think a lot of funny websites in this list, as well.
Now, of course, you can add to this list at any time. You can just type in the URL here at the top. Or you can make your own, as well. Here, I've created one called No Video. It's pretty simple. All it has is Netflix or YouTube.
If I wanna create a new block list, I just have Add block list to the top left. I'm gonna call this one, let's just call this one Social. Let's spell it right, Social Media. And then I can just, again, I can just start typing in what social media websites. I'm gonna add Facebook. I'm gonna add Twitter. I'm gonna add LinkedIn.
Although it is business related, sometimes we can get lost on LinkedIn, as well. And I can always edit this over time. You can also import other lists. Because I know there's some great websites that have some great lists of their own, but what I like to do. You probably only have a good handful of websites that you know you are tempted to visit more often than you should.
So you might wanna just start with a list of maybe half a dozen, to 10 or 12 that you know are your biggest culprits and add them to a list. I can hit Save, and now I've got my block list here.
The next thing that we wanna do is we wanna go over to timers. So here you can see the different lists that we've created. And I'm gonna do a quick example here. So I'm gonna use the Distractions list. I'm gonna use that big list there. All you need to do is say when do you want to block all of these websites until.
So I'm gonna pick today, and I'm just gonna do it for a couple of minutes here. So I'm gonna say 10:30. Now you choose breaks if you like. Here, you've got a few different defaults here. Sprint A, B, and C, and Allowance A and B. I'm gonna show you more details about that a little later on. So I'm gonna say None for the time being.
And last but not least, when we're ready to go, we can hit Start, or we can turn this to On. Now you're gonna get a warning here. It's gonna say, "Are you sure you want to block 'Distractions' for about six minutes? "This action cannot be reversed "if 'lock timers' is enabled."
Now you can go into settings and change this default, but I think this is exactly what makes Cold Turkey such an effective blocker is because you can't skirt around it, right? If you need distraction-free time, you wanna make it extremely difficult if not impossible for you to go to that website or to go to those social media or video or whatever that website is and take you away from your most important goal.
So I'm gonna say, yeah, I'm sure. I wanna be distraction free. So now if I go to the internet, and look, I've already got YouTube pulled up here. I'm gonna go to that YouTube tab, and, oh, Vince Carter docs, let's go, oh. Nope, I've been blocked by Cold Turkey.
And Cold Turkey will even give me a bit of an inspirational quote: "Your time is limited, "so don't waste it living someone else's life." Okay, what about Twitter? What if I wanna go to Twitter? I wanna click on something here, and, oh, nope. Cold Turkey again. And I've got my inspirational quote here by Mark Twain.
You may think that this is kind of cheesy, adding these different quotes here when you reach a site which has been blocked, but sometimes it can stop and make you think about, oh, yeah. This is the most important thing I should be working on. I should really be coming back to this report. This needs to be done today. I need to be head-down.
Now you're probably thinking how can I work my way around this? Well, how about incognito mode? Yeah, let's go into private browsing. There's no way it's going to skirt around private browsing. Let's go to Facebook.com, and (groans) even in private browsing. "It doesn't matter how slowly you go "as long as you do not stop."
So this again, I think is one of the great things about Cold Turkey is that it's gonna block you even in private mode. It's gonna force you to get back or really strongly encourage you to get back to that task that you need to do.
So let's go back into the interface. This block is still on. It's still gonna remain on for a few more minutes, and I'm gonna show you what happens when the block is over. But until then, I wanna show you some of the other features here within Cold Turkey.
There is a scheduling feature. So if you want to have distraction-free time at certain points of the day, you can build that right into your schedule. So here, I've got a few different blocks here where I want to be distraction free. Let's say I wanna add in another one.
Maybe I wanna do some head-down writing tomorrow, let's say early tomorrow morning. So I'm gonna say 7:00 a.m., just click and drag. I'm gonna say 7:00 to about nine o'clock, about there. When I let go, I can see this little dialog. I can adjust the time here.
And here I can choose which distraction list, right? So do I want the bulk, the 54 site distraction list, or is it really video that hurts me the most in the morning? So why don't I say No Video at that time. We're gonna leave Breaks alone for now, and I'm gonna hit Save.
So now automatically, I don't have to start a timer. I don't have to initiate anything. I'm gonna have those particular sites blocked during that time tomorrow. And this is such a simple interface. I like the way they've designed it here is that this is going to be your weekly schedule.
So you can adjust it over time, but for many of us, you may have a certain routine or a certain time of the week where you really need that distraction-free time, you can build that in here as a part of the schedule.
Okay, let's get back to breaks. Under Settings is where we can edit our breaks. And there are two different types. There's our Daily Allowance, and then there's our Sprints down below. So the Daily Allowance, it gives you two different options.
Allowance A or Allowance B. Let's say you want to allow yourself 20 minutes of free time, or Allowance B I've got set here currently for 60 minutes, so you're allowed a certain amount of time to go to those websites to watch videos, to browse, and to contribute on social media. However, when that time is up, it's going to block those particular websites.
Sprints work a little bit differently. And if you think of the Pomodoro Technique, you can choose how long you want to work and then how long you want your break to be. So, of course, during the work time, you're not gonna be able to access those websites and those applications, but you will get a few minutes break if you need to get away and you want to watch a YouTube video such as this one right now.
The one other area that I wanna show you here in part of the interface is statistics. Cold Turkey does provide some high-level statistics here as to your top five apps that you have been using and the top five websites that you are visiting.
Now this isn't very granular. In fact, it's pretty basic stuff that it's showing you here in terms of those websites and the amount of time that you're spending there. But you might be able to see a bit of a theme over time.
Alright, so there we have the little announcement here on the bottom right-hand corner: Well Done! Your time block named "Distractions" is now over. So you will get a similar notification on your desktop when that distraction-free time is done.
Now you can adjust these notifications if you like. But it can be helpful if you're looking forward to that break and if you need to get away from that important task or that most important to-do, and do something a little more frivolous, maybe something a little more entertaining.
If you'd like to learn more about Cold Turkey, you can go to GetColdTurkey.com and try all of these features for free. There is a basic version, which gives you all of the website-blocking functionality, and if you'd like to block even other things such as applications and games on your computer, well, you can upgrade to the pro version and do that, as well.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
