How to Block YouTube
Being the world’s second largest search engine and third most visited site after Google and Facebook, Youtube is a very popular website where you can spend hours upon hours watching all kinds of things. It is also one of the most common sources of distraction online.
You can use FocusMe to control how long you access Youtube each day and be more productive on your work and/or studies.
Creating the Plan
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 Site” button.
Go to the custom tab and type in “youtube.com” (without the quotes). Make sure that the type is set to “URL”. Then click “Done”.
Your Blocklist should look like below. Then click on “Next”.
The next page is the Application page. Just hit “Next” here to skip it.
Limiting Usage
For this tutorial, we would like to limit the use of Youtube, not block it entirely. Let’s say we like to limit ourselves to using Youtube for only an hour a day. Here’s how you do it.
On the Focus Type page (4/6), select “Time Limit”.
Set the time period to “Per Day”, making it a daily limit. Set the time allowed to 1 hour (01:00) which means you can only access Youtube for 1 hour each day. Then click “Next”.
On the next page, set the schedule mode to “Schedule”.
Tick the “Select All” box then click “Set schedule”
Highlight the whole scheduling bar blue. This means the plan will be active for the whole day. Make sure the schedule is set to 00:00 – 24:00 for a 24-hour schedule.
Setting an end date is optional, but you can set a date when the plan stops by ticking the box beside “Set end date”.
Click on “Next” to go to the last page.
On the last page, you can set the type of protection as per your preference.
NOTE: Setting the protection to “Forced” means you cannot stop the plan manually. Use with caution.
Click “Done” when you are finished.
And you’re all set! Keep this Focus plan running in the background to limit your access to Youtube to an hour per day. If you feel that this scheduling scheme is not best for you, you can always go back to the settings and tweak it until you have a Focus plan that works for you.