How to Block Social Media (or other sites) with FocusMe

Follow this guide to learn how to create a new plan (or edit an existing one) and block social media websites.

The first thing you do is either create a new plan or edit an existing one. To create a new plan, hit the “add plan” button on the upper right. To edit an existing plan, you can either right-click on the plan and select “Edit Plan” or hit the respective ellipsis on the right.

Type the name of the Focus plan (for editing existing plans, the name shows up here) then hit “Next”

On the next page, click on the “Add” button.

You can select the website/s in the History tab, where recent websites you’ve been to are listed:

Or manually input them in the Custom tab. Note: you can add more than one URL by hitting enter after each, as shown below:

Hit Done to add the item/s on the list. Then hit “Next”.

You can skip the Applications page by clicking on “Next”. For the Focus type, we can set it to “Just Block”. Then hit “Next” again.

For the Scheduling Mode, you can select “Quick” for now and set it to 30 minutes. Then hit “Next”.

For Protection, you can go with the default setting which is a random password that is 8 characters long. Now hit “Done” to save the changes you made.

You can press “Start” to start your Focus plan. Once started, your plan would start working.

Try accessing the websites you blocked using different browsers. You would notice that FocusMe automatically blocks these websites.

You can check the remaining time before the Focus Plan ends in the Plans window:

If you wish to stop the plan before it ends, you can click on “Stop” and input the password. Then hit “Accept”.

In this case, we set the password type to be random with 8 characters. That means FocusMe will generate 8 random characters that you need to type in to stop the Focus plan. The characters are random and will change each time.

You can set the password types as follows:

  1. None – No passwords used. You can stop the Focus plan freely.
  2. Random Chars – FocusMe will generate a random password every time you try to stop the Focus plan.
  3. Password – Set your own password and FocusMe will ask for it when you want to stop the Focus plan.
  4. Forced – Does not give you any means to stop the plan. Please use this option with caution.

You can also change the plan’s Focus type. You can double-click the type as shown:

The Focus plan Wizard would appear on this page:

Click on “Change Type” to change the Focus type:

  1. Just Block – Automatically blocks websites/applications
  2. Time Limit – Sets a time limit to the blocked websites/applications.

    Note: The Focus Type Time Limit works well with Scheduling Modes Daily or Weekly, instead of Quick.
  3. Launch Limit – Lets you launch a website/application for a limited number of times.

For this tutorial, let’s set the Focus Type to “Time Limit” and set it to 5 minutes per hour:

When you access a blocked website, FocusMe would show the remaining time you can access them:

That’s it for the basics. Once you get the hang of it, you can try different things until you design the perfect Focus plan for you.

 

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