My first blocking setup had five entries: Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and a news site. I felt extremely responsible about it.
It did nothing. Not because I found a way around it, but because those five were not where my attention was going. It was going to email, a work chat app I had classified as work, and a documentation site I could read for forty minutes without learning anything. All three were allowed, because all three had a defensible reason to be.
A focus profile is a pre-committed configuration of what you can reach during a specific kind of work. It only functions if it is built from the task backwards: decide what the next hour actually requires, allow that, and close everything else, including the things that look productive. The generic blocklist fails because it blocks what is embarrassing rather than what is tempting, and your attention has no interest in what is embarrassing.
Before opening any settings, answer three questions about the block of work.
What am I producing? Not "working on the report." A section, a fixed bug, a marked set of essays. Concrete enough that you would know at the end whether it happened.
What do I genuinely need open to produce it? Write the actual list. For most knowledge work it is shorter than people expect: one or two applications, maybe two reference sites. Every item you add for comfort rather than need is a route your attention now has.
What do I reach for when this gets hard? This is the important one, and you cannot answer it from memory. Spend one working day noting on paper the specific thing you opened in the five seconds after the work got difficult. Not "got distracted," the exact destination. That list is what your profile is really for, and it usually holds two things you would never have guessed.
Built without the third question, a profile blocks the wrong things. Built without the second, it is so strict you disable it on the first legitimate exception.
Blacklist means everything is allowed except what you list. Whitelist means everything is blocked except what you list.
Short version: whitelist when you know exactly what the task needs, blacklist when the work requires unpredictable access, like open research. A whitelist is better at preventing drift, because you cannot end up somewhere you did not plan to go. A blacklist is better at staying out of your way, which matters more than people admit, because a profile you keep disabling protects nothing. I have argued this out properly in Blacklist vs Whitelist Blocking: A Decision Framework That Actually Holds Up. For most people the answer is both, one per mode of work, rather than picking a side.
Deep Focus treats app blocking and website blocking as separate settings, and they should be configured differently, because they fail differently.
Apps are few and known. You have maybe thirty installed and use eight, so an app whitelist is easy to write and rarely wrong. App blocking can be strict without much risk, and this is where the biggest distractions live anyway: the chat client, the mail client, the game launcher.
Websites are infinite. You cannot enumerate them, which is why website blacklists leak. If the work does not need open browsing, a website whitelist is the setting that actually changes behaviour.
The sensible combination: whitelist apps tightly, and set websites to whitelist for deep work but blacklist for research. Splitting them is often the difference between a profile that holds and one that leaks.
Email, Slack, Teams, YouTube, the browser itself. Permanently blocking them is not honest advice, because your job requires them. Leaving them open means you are never more than a few seconds from an interruption you generated yourself.
The workable answer is scheduled access: reachable during defined windows, unreachable outside them. In practice that means two profiles rather than one exception. A Deep profile with mail and chat blocked, and a Comms profile with them allowed and everything else closed, so the communication block is focused too rather than a free-for-all. Put both on the Weekly Scheduler at fixed times, or lay them out in the Session Planner, and switching stops being a decision you make while tired.
YouTube is two sites wearing one hostname: a reference tool and a slot machine. If you need it for work, allow it in the research profile only.
The rule: the answer to "I need this sometimes" is a second profile, not a hole in the first one.
People skip this, and it is why strict profiles get abandoned. When a profile is tight, the friction is not the blocked things. It is the allowed things you cannot easily reach: the document, the wiki page, the ticketing tool. Three minutes of hunting for something legitimate breaks a session, and irritates you enough to turn the profile off tomorrow.
Quick Actions are shortcuts you attach to a profile, launching a specific app or opening a specific URL, and they stay available during the session. The principle: everything you legitimately need should be one click closer than usual, while everything else is gone. A profile that only takes things away feels like punishment. One that also puts the right three things in front of you feels like a workspace.
My writing profile has three: draft folder, style guide, dictionary. My coding profile has internal docs, ticket board, log viewer. I have never needed a fourth.
Deep Focus can optionally block Task Manager, Terminal, System Settings, installers, and sign-out buttons while a session runs. This exists because the usual way people defeat a blocker is not a clever workaround, it is killing the process the moment the work gets hard.
The caveat, stated plainly: you own the machine, so none of this makes bypass impossible. You can restart. Anyone claiming a user-space blocker is unbreakable is selling something. What these restrictions do is raise the cost of quitting from two seconds to two minutes, inserting a gap between the impulse and the escape. That gap is usually enough, because the impulse is not strong, it is just fast.
Turn them on for hard work you have a history of bailing out of, or for deadline and exam work where the stakes justify it. Leave them off if you need a terminal during the day, where locking it is a self-inflicted wound. Match the restriction to the profile, not to your ambition.
The Focus Browser is a minimal browser built into the app, with extension support if you need it. Its value is that it starts empty: no pinned tabs, no session restore, no forty things you were halfway through, which beats your normal browser for research blocks. It can also be disabled per profile, which is right for a profile whose point is that there is no web at all.
AI chat access is also per profile. Allow it where it is a working tool, deny it where it becomes a conversational way of avoiding the work. You can also prevent off-topic conversations and set a custom system prompt, which is the difference between an assistant that helps you write the thing and one that discusses anything at all for twenty minutes.
Here are three I actually use, with the reasoning rather than just the settings.
1. Deep Draft (writing, 90 minute blocks, mornings)
Apps: whitelist, writing app and notes app only, so mail, chat and the normal browser are gone. Websites: whitelist with nothing on it, so no web at all. System restrictions on, because this is the profile I have historically bailed out of. Quick Actions: draft folder, style guide, dictionary. Focus Browser disabled. AI denied.
The reasoning: drafting needs no inputs. Everything is already in my head or the notes file, and every lookup I think I need is a break dressed up as research. The AI is denied because asking it to help with a sentence is how I avoid writing the sentence.
2. Research Open (reading, investigating, 60 minute blocks)
Apps: whitelist, slightly wider. Browser, notes, PDF reader. Websites: blacklist, because I cannot predict what I will need. It is specific and personal: social sites, news, video, two forums, and the aggregator I convinced myself was professional reading. System restrictions off. Quick Actions: library database, notes file. Focus Browser enabled. AI allowed, off-topic conversations prevented.
The reasoning: whitelisting websites would make this work impossible, so I accept a leakier mode and compensate with an unusually honest blacklist. The session is shorter because a blacklist demands more of you.
3. Comms (email, chat, admin, 45 minutes, twice a day)
Apps: whitelist. Mail, chat, calendar. Websites: blacklist covering the usual suspects. No system restrictions. Quick Actions: ticket board and expenses tool, the two admin jobs I otherwise postpone for a fortnight. AI allowed.
The reasoning: this is a focus profile too, which surprises people. Left unstructured, communication expands to fill the day. A 45 minute Comms block with everything else closed clears the inbox faster than three hours of ambient availability, and it buys the Deep Draft block the right to be unreachable.
Building one maximally strict profile for everything. This kills more setups than anything else. A profile that blocks everything works beautifully for two days, then you need to send one email and you disable it. Once disabled, it is no longer a pre-commitment, it is a suggestion, and suggestions lose to the moment. Three moderate profiles beat one absolute one.
Blocking what is embarrassing instead of what is tempting. Professional-looking distractions do more damage, because you never resist them: documentation you do not need, reorganising notes, reading about the tool instead of using it.
Forgetting the second browser. If Chrome is blocked and Edge is not, the profile is decorative.
Naming them badly. "Focus Mode" and "Focus Mode 2" force a decision every time you start. Name them after the work, so the name answers "what am I doing for the next hour." Three to five such profiles is the working number: fewer and you fight exceptions, more and choosing becomes its own avoided decision.
Expect two kinds of error.
Too tight: you hit something you legitimately needed and had to stop. Add it, or add a Quick Action for it. Do not disable the profile to get at it, because that is the habit that ends the whole system.
Too loose: you finished a session and could not say where the time went. This is where distraction tracking in Analytics earns its place. It records which apps were opened during focus sessions, naming the escape routes you did not notice taking. Nearly everyone finds a surprise in the first fortnight, and it is rarely the app they had been busy blocking.
After the second or third revision a profile settles. Export it once it does, so a reinstall does not cost you the hour again.
Decide what the work needs before deciding what to block, then choose whitelist for bounded tasks and blacklist for open research. Configure apps separately from websites, since apps whitelist safely while website blacklists leak. Add shortcuts to the few things you legitimately need, and expect to revise twice in the first fortnight.
Yes during defined blocks, no permanently. The honest arrangement is scheduled access: a deep profile where they are blocked, and a separate communication profile where they are the only thing open, both on a fixed schedule. Being reliably reachable at known times is what makes being unreachable the rest of the time acceptable to everyone else.
Yes, on a computer you administer, and any product claiming otherwise is overselling. The point is to raise the cost of quitting from instant to inconvenient, which is enough for the shallow impulse behind most self-interruption. If you routinely put real effort into bypassing your own settings, the profile is wrong for the work rather than too weak.
Note it, finish the block, then edit the profile. The exception you make in the moment is rarely as important as it feels, and its cost is that the profile stops being a commitment. Treat "I need X" as a request to change the configuration later, not grounds for ending the session.
The hour you spend on this is not really configuration. It is you, clear-headed and unhurried, deciding on behalf of the version of you who will be tired at 3pm and looking for a way out. That version will not choose well. The point is that you already chose.
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