James Clarke & Projects

No Links Please!

No Links Please! is a productivity life hack for those of us who need to concentrate and are easy tempted by the vast expanse of the web. It is similar in spirit to Webolodeon.

Why?

One of the things which makes the web great are its hyperlinks. However, they also make the web vast and most importantly, far too easy to roam. No Links Please! breaks the web by removing hyperlinks from all pages apart from Google. Without the knowledge or temptation of links you are free to devote all your time to real work and never roam the web again.

But I cannot work without the web!

The web is still accessible, you just have to search for it and find it in one link from Google. It also has a few other exceptions tailored to a typical PhD student’s life.

Be Productive!

No Links Please! is only available for Firefox. It is implemented as a Greasemonkey script. To embrace a new life:

  1. Download and install Firefox.
  2. You’ll need to install Greasemonkey next.
  3. Visit the No Links Please! script page and confirm installation and enjoy a life of vastly improved productivity.

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11 Comments

It’s not just for Firefox. I have just installed it on Safari 3.0.4 on Mac OS X, thanks to GreaseKit. Now, to uninstall it. :-)

 Craig S. Cottingham on 21 January 2008

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Is it irony or comedy that the No Links Please! page contains links? Great script, I’m looking forward to managing my focus a little better with it.

 Dan Philpott on 22 January 2008

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Since I got here via a link, I feel it would be wrong somehow to install No Links Please.

 Kieran Jadiker-Smith on 23 January 2008

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And if you want to fight the waste of time caused by SN-abuse, I have come up with http://solitudr.com

Come to think of it: I spend too much time commenting on blogs… :)

 Stefan Waidele on 23 January 2008

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Wow! No Links Please! increased my productivity by 100%. I went from writing one paragraph of my PhD thesis per day to one paragraph plus one comment on this website per day. However, it does not yet seem to be compatible with my implementation of No Net Please! Will there be future upgrades to fix this?

 Sebastian on 24 January 2008

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Oh man, thank you SO MUCH for this script. I installed on my PC at work and it has really helped me cut down on my “distractions” when trying to get work done. Fabulous!

 Mike on 27 January 2008

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This is basically splitting hairs, but I modified my copy of the script to remove the ‘href’ attribute on links and set their .style.cursor to ‘default’, rather than actually replacing them with spans. This preserves the original CSS display rules while rendering them unclickable, and it’s a tad faster becasue the browser doesn’t do a reflow/layout for each replaced element.

not an important difference I’m sure, but I thought you might like to know!

 henrah on 29 January 2008

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Incidentally, here is the code I used:

Array.slice(document.links).forEach(function(link){
link.removeAttribute(’href’);
link.style.cursor = ‘default’;
});

 henrah on 29 January 2008

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It sounds like an attractive nuisance. Cute at first but ultimately annoying as you won’t be able to do online banking, anything requiring a site login, or multi-step processes. Perhaps it would be more useful to eliminate only links to external websites, and leave internal links intact. That will stop the “surfing” part of web surfing.

 albert butfuttock on 29 January 2008

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@albert: I’m sure you’re aware that you can disable greasemonkey scripts on the fly, right? Have to do banking? Disable it. Need to login somewhere? Disable it.

 Aaron Griffin on 1 February 2008

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Wow, if only Greasemonkey could extend real life… No Crack Please, No Gambling Please, No WoW Please.

 Justin on 2 February 2008

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