Facebook is distracting. My Facebook news feed gives me update after update of people I kind-of sort-of know. My ex-girlfriend went to a club with her friends last week. A kid I tangentially know from high school with just got into a prestigious grad school. That girl I met while studying abroad is oversharing about her last breakup. It’s not that I don’t care about these people, maybe I do. It’s that getting sucked into these stories takes a lot of time and watching other peoples lives prevents me from living my own.

Facebook is great for messaging friends, keeping up with events, and storing photos. But I do not want to get sucked into the endless news feed and end up going through spring break photos of a group of friends that I don’t even know.

To resolve this problem, I made a Chrome extension that removes your news feed and replaces it with a nice nature photo and an inspirational quote. The picture and quote only change once a day to prevent you from refreshing the page just to see more quotes.

After installing this extension, my productivity has gone way up. In the past, I would open Facebook, see something that distracted me for twenty minutes and leave without accomplishing what I originally opened Facebook for. I am now able to log in to Facebook, finish what I need to do, and continue on with my life.

I got this idea from Neal Wu’s Chrome extension KillNewsFeed which replaces your photo with the quote “Don’t get distracted by Facebook.” I didn’t like being admonished so I decided to clean it up.

Here is a screenshot of the extension, Better News Feed:

Install my extension, Better News Feed, by clicking here. You can also check on the code on Github.

Thanks to Ryan Lau for helping edit this post and to Unsplash for providing images for the extension.