Why I uninstalled Chrome to increase my productivity

Almost since it first came out, I’ve been using Chrome to surf the web. But recently I decided to try something else, use two browsers, to increase my productivity. One for work, and one for personal use.

I’m reading a book called Atomic Habits by Jame Clear, highly recommend, and he talks about how to create and sustain good habits and decrease bad habits. One bad habit I had noticed while working was how easy it was for me to check the news, Facebook, Medium or something else instead of working. Especially when I hit a little bit of a wall or was switching between task. It was easy to think “I’ll take a look at/start on this in 5 minutes”. We all know that five minutes are never just five minutes.

So after reading the chapter about reducing or increasing friction, in order to make habits stick or make them more challenging to do, I thought “How can I make it more difficult for me to check Facebook (or other sites)?”. It’s was so easy to check some of my favourite sites because Chrome had all my bookmarks and logins saved. So I thought off using a different browser on my work computer, that only had work-related bookmarks and logins. That would make it a little more challenging for me to check my favourite sites.

So exported my work bookmarks, uninstalled Chrome and started using Edge on my work computer.

Why not use Firefox at least? Well, I think most people can agree with me when I say that Edge isn’t the best browser one that market. I even think Microsoft agrees since they are going to build Edge on Chromium in the future. It’s not as fast as Chrome or Firefox, but I’m not doing anything heavy in my browser. I’m mainly checking the status of my build or deployment. And then I’m Binging (googling) work-related problems.
Also because of the lower performance, when I do sneak onto YouTube, it’s slower searching, or loading, which is frustrating, and because of that, it’s not as fun going to YouTube.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, and I do believe it has helped me keep my productivity up. I realize not everybody has separate computers for work and personal, so it’s not as convenient to uninstall Chrome (or the browser you use) but maybe there something you can do to minimize the odds of checking on Medium for “5 minutes”.

What are some of the tricks you use to increase your productivity?

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