The other day I watched an interview on Matt D’Avella’s YouTube channel in which they discussed the pursuit of the essential, social media and distractions in life. One of his guests talked about this neat little hack to keep his social media addiction and old ingrained habits in check.

You open a web browser and out of a sudden you’re staring at Facebook but you didn’t even consciously make the decision to visit this page. Waiting for a test to run and catch yourself staring at your Twitter time line even tho you wanted to reduce your social media consumption.

Sounds familiar?

You’re not alone in this. Social media companies spend millions to implement exactly this behaviour within our brains.

A relative straight forward way to circumvent this from happening on your phone is to delete the social media apps. But what do you do when you’re at your computer and opening your browser is just a single click away (or it’s open already anyway).

Say hi to redirect extensions! And that’s the deal: Open a Google Doc and write down your life goals – the things that are essential to you. Save this document and setup the redirect extension to send you to this file whenever you try to access the social media site you’re currently still hooked to.

• Google Chrome: Switcheroo
• Firefox: Redirecor

Safari: Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find an extension that still works. If you come across one please send a link my way.

I bet a constant reminder of what is essential to you instead of brainlessly browsing social media will help you as well to get rid of this annoying behaviour.