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Noise Cancellation / Music

Streaming Music Services

Spotify.com

Apple Music

Brain.fm

White Noise

Lectrofan White Noise Machine: Amazon.com

Noisli – Improve focus and boost productivity with background noise: noisli.com

HoMedics Sound machine: Amazon.com

Media Distraction Apps

If you feel that your teen seriously lacks the self-control to monitor his/her tech usage, there are dozens of apps and settings that can be installed directly on a computer. These programs allow you to set time periods during which your teen will have no access to the Internet at all or block certain websites from his/her computer during certain parts of the day. As with any technology, it changes daily, but here are a few of the most common media distraction plug-ins available:

Freedom (macfreedom.com):

Freedom works by disabling a computer’s internet connection for the time period you specify. When Freedom is running on your teen’s computer, he/she will not able to get online at all. Freedom makes no permanent changes to the computer. If your teen needs to get back online, say, to do research for a paper, he/she can just reboot the computer.

Anti-Social (anti-social.cc):

Rather than blocking the Internet in its entirety, Anti-Social automatically blocks all known time-robbers for a set period of time. Sites that are off limit include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and more.

Self-Control (selfcontrolapp.com):

With Self-Control, you can block out distracting websites for a set amount of time. It is truly customizable in terms of which sites you can block and for how long. No amount of browser restarts or computer reboots will stop it. However, rather than completely disabling the entire Internet, you can selectively decide which sites are OK or not.

DF Tube - Allow yourself to focus while using YouTube™ for work, recreation or education with this Google Chrome extension.

One Tab - Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter. Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.

Cold Turkey (getcoldturkey.com):

Cold Turkey is specifically designed for students to help them focus and stay on-track. Not only does it block common websites and programs, but you can also program it to block certain computer games as well.

Stay on Task (Available from Google Play)

StayFocused: stayfocused.com

Focus Me: focusme.com

Dewo: memory.ai/dewo

Ommwriter: ommwriter.com

Momentum: momentumdash.com