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This is the concept behind Freedom – a productivity app that lets you block distracting websites and apps so you can keep doing what matters most. That means just five emails throughout the day could end up costing you almost two hours of productivity and a 2007 study from Microsoft backs this theory up. #2: FreedomĪccording to Freedom, you lose 23 minutes every time you check an email, open up social media, respond to a notification or any other distraction gets in the way of your workflow.

Install blocs app extensions free#

If you’re interested in trying it out – feel free to join the beta here and I’ll send you a link to try it out shortly. As you can see from the screenshot below, Serene also gently reminds you of what you should be working on instead.Īs mentioned, Serene is currently in private beta.

Install blocs app extensions install#

If you install the browser extension, then you will also be blocked from visiting any distracting websites on your blocklist while you’re in a Serene session. When you ‘Go Serene’ (start a session) a few things happen: First of all, a countdown timer appears in the Serene app, soothing focus music starts playing, and any distracting apps will be closed and blocked until your session ends. We built Serene because after growing tired of many of the existing tools that only solved a piece of the puzzle – we wanted something that in one click would enable us to get focused. While still in private beta, Serene is a free MacOS application built by our team that helps you focus on what matters by encouraging you to set one goal a day and then break your day up into distraction-free sessions. What are the top website & app blockers?īelow are the tools we’re going to review & compare in this article. The good news is there are various apps you can use block out these distractions and we’re going to look at ten of the best of them in this article. So this gives us a good idea of what the average office worker might be getting up to throughout the working day and if you’re running a business with office-based employees, you’re looking at one of the biggest barriers to productivity. In fact, five out of the top ten workplace distractions ranked in this study involve the internet or phone apps.

What a surprise, social media is the biggest distraction (47%) and reading news websites comes in at a close second (45%).

Discussing out of work activities with colleagues – 38%.

This is a difficult question to answer on a personal level because – let’s face it – we’re good at lying to ourselves and believing what we want to believe.Ī study by VoucherCloud asked 1,989 UK full-time office workers about their daily working habits and found the top ten distractions keeping them from getting things done were: In other words, these findings suggest we’re only productive for less than 37% of an 8-hour working day and there are plenty of other studies with similar conclusions.Īny entrepreneur is going to weep into their coffee at that kind of statistic and things are even worse for business owners tallying up the total amount of wasted hours between all of their employees.Ĭlearly, we’ve got a productivity problem on our hands but what’s keeping us from hitting targets consistently? What’s keeping us from being productive? Two separate studies – one carried out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (US) and another by VoucherCloud (UK) – both find the average worker spends just two hours and 53 minutes being productive during an 8-hour day.Įven if we round this up to three hours per day, this still means most of us are spending more than five hours per day, over 25 per week and more than 100 hours every munch underachieving. In a typical 8-hour day, how many hours do you spend actually being productive? If you’re anything like the average worker, it’s probably a lot less than you would like to admit.