The easiest way to stop mindlessly using an app or website

3 min readApr 9, 2024

If you’ve ever found yourself mindlessly loading a website without thinking about, this short article will help you stop.

What happens

I’ve had this habit for loading YouTube, Twitter, and Medium, without even thinking about it.

How it happens is:

I open a new tab in my browser.

2. I type the first letter or two of the website i.e. ‘Yo’ for ‘YouTube’ or ‘Me’ for Medium.

Typing the first letter of the website and showing autocomplete, i.e. Medium

3. I’ll hit the enter key on my keyboard.

This will immediately load the website I’m subconsciously opening.

I use the Chrome browser by Google and it is so good that they know exactly what I want to go to with only a keystroke or two.

How to fix it

To fix this, do the same thing:

Open a new tab

2. Type in the first letter or two.

3. Remove the suggestion for the first result.

This will remove the history of them knowing you want to navigate to this page.

If the top couple of results are for the same website you can remove the top few results, but in my experience, removing the top one does the trick.

No more mindlessly browsing

Now, when you open a new tab, start typing the website, and hit enter, you’ll be taken to the second result which probably isn’t the one you subconsciously wanted to visit.

The second result will open, you’ll be confused, and then you’ll have successfully stopped the habit.

I’ve successfully done this for YouTube, Twitter, and Medium and I spend significantly less time visiting these websites.

Yes, it’ll make actually going to those website harder because you’ll need to type out their full name, but I do not see that as a problem as long as the bad habit has been fixed.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Happy Twosday ✌️

#UseTwos ✌️

Use code “baller”