Undop
Like most internet users, I waste too much time on the web. Despite that, I’ve never had much luck with the apps that set out to solve this, like Freedom or RescueTime. They feel too heavy-handed. Instead, I want fairly repetitive and annoying prods that make wasting time less fun—the equivalent of small electric shocks, counterbalancing the Dopamine hits.
So here’s undop. Every time I visit a domain in ~/.bad_sites, it dims the display by 30%, gradually returning it to its previous brightness over the course of 30 seconds. It’s both an annoyance and a reminder. The effect is small enough that I don’t mind it on those occasions when I actually do want to read Twitter or Hacker News or whatever blog, but it’s jarring enough that I now subconsciously avoiding following links to them, and have mostly broken the check-for-new-stuff muscle memory.
Caveats: it only works with Safari on OS X. (Patches with support for other browsers welcome.) I’m guessing it might not be good for display backlights.