Procrastination
While working at home without any deadlines, I found I kept reading BBC News repeatedly, almost unconsciously. This is not something I ever did when I worked in an office environment. In the past, I had used some Chrome extensions that block websites to solve this, but they always seemed to rely on trust. The Chrome app permissions system is very broad, to perform this task they all request every URL entered, which sounds scary. And articles like this added to my concerns.
Solve the problem myself (maybe this is procrastination too!)
To my surprise, it's remarkably easy to create a Chrome extension, so I wrote my own to block URLs that distract me. Publishing to the Chrome Web Store requires a one-time $5 'registration' fee. Publishing took a while in "pending review" status, my first publish was rejected for unknown reasons, the second time succeeded. I wouldn't particularly recommend my Chrome extension to anyone else, it does what I need... and no more. Now I'm hoping it stops me from following any football transfer rumours instead of coding.
Extension in Chrome Web Store:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-websites-please/kofhmlkejonbhoiclcmgdgmdenlebegg
Code:https://github.com/cdsinge/chrome-simple-block-sites
Privacy policy
Since the extension I created does use user data, and stores user data (the list of blocked URLs is stored the user's Chrome storage), I believe this falls under GDPR (or if not, at least under Google's policy to provide one)... and so requires a policy.