I walked into a client's office last year—let’s call him David, a brilliant creative director who hadn't hit a deadline in six months. His monitor looked like a crime scene. He had Slack bouncing, Asana pinging, three different "focus timers" fighting for dominance, and exactly 64 tabs open.
He looked at me, dead in the eyes, and said, "Leon, I think I need another monitor."
He didn't need another monitor. He needed an exorcism.
We spent the next hour deleting things. Not organizing. Deleting. We stripped his browser down to the bare metal. The result? He finished his backlog in three days. That's when I understood the fundamental mistake everyone makes with ADHD productivity: You are trying to add structure, when you should be subtracting noise.
Stop Using "Normal" Productivity Tools
The Lie: "You just need a better to-do list."
The Reality: To-do lists are where tasks go to die. For an ADHD brain, a list hidden in a tab ceases to exist due to a lack of object permanence. If you can't see it, it's not real.
The Solution: We are shifting from "Time Management" to "Environment Design." We aren't managing your willpower. We are designing a browser environment where getting distracted is technically difficult.
This isn't for the "hustle culture" junkies who love color-coded calendars. This is for the people who open a tab to check the weather and lose three hours reading about the history of cement.
Here is the "Quiet Browser" Stack I use to survive the modern web.
Phase 1: The "Visual Noise" Killers
The modern web is hostile to the ADHD brain. Every sidebar, every "recommended reading," and every red notification badge is a dopamine trap designed to fragment your attention. You need to scrub it clean.
1. uBlock Origin
Look, this isn't optional. If you are browsing the web without an ad blocker, you are voluntarily letting advertisers hijack your dopamine receptors. The flashing banners and sidebar videos are burning your mental energy before you even start working.
- The Rule: Install it. Forget it. Never turn it off.
2. Postlight Reader (or Reader View)
This is the single most underrated tool for neurodivergent focus. It strips a webpage down to just text. No sidebars. No "sign up for our newsletter" popups. Just the words.
- How I use it: I use this for everything. Even long emails or documentation. If I can't read it in Reader Mode, I don't read it.
3. News Feed Eradicator
You don't need to block Facebook or LinkedIn completely (you might need them for work). You need to block the feed. This extension replaces the infinite scroll with a nice, stoic quote. You can still message people, check specific pages, and do your job. But you can't doom-scroll.
Phase 2: The "Time Blindness" Solvers
"I sat down for 5 minutes and now it's 3 hours later." Sound familiar? That’s time blindness. Standard clocks don't help because they blend into the background.
4. Stretchly
Most Pomodoro timers are trash because they are too polite. You just ignore the little "ding." Stretchly is aggressive. When your break time comes, it takes over your screen. It forces you to stop.
- Why it works: Without a hard break, you will hyperfocus for 6 hours, forget to eat, and then burn out for two days. This forces the reset.
5. Momentum
Replace your "New Tab" page immediately. Standard new tabs are chaos—news snippets, shortcuts, search bars. Momentum is a picture of a mountain and a single question: "What is your focus for today?" It acts as a gentle slap in the face every time you open a tab to procrastinate, reminding you of the one thing you’re supposed to be doing.
Phase 3: The "Object Permanence" Fix
6. OneTab
A client of mine, a senior dev, used to have 80 tabs open "just in case." His computer sounded like a jet engine. He was terrified to close them because of Object Permanence issues—if he closed the tab, the task was gone forever.
OneTab solves this. You click one button, and it collapses all open tabs into a single list. They are safe. They are saved. But they aren't eating your RAM or your visual attention. It turns your browser clutter into a tidy "Read Later" list.
The "Anti-Tool": Why I Uninstalled Grammarly
Here's the thing: I hate Grammarly.
For an ADHD writer, that constant red underlining is a massive perfectionism trigger. You write a sentence, see a red line, and stop to fix it. You lose your flow. You switch from "Creative Mode" to "Editor Mode" every 4 seconds. It’s exhausting.
My advice: Write in a plain text editor or turn Grammarly OFF while drafting. Only turn it on at the very end.
The "Monday Morning" Reset
Don't try to install all of these at once. You'll get overwhelmed. Start here:
- Install uBlock Origin.
- Install OneTab.
- Delete every other extension that you haven't used in the last week.
If an extension requires you to manage a dashboard or input data, it is not a solution. It is a distraction. Keep it simple.
(Side note: I genuinely believe Dark Mode is making your astigmatism worse and hurting your focus, but the tech world isn't ready for that conversation yet. Fight me.)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a chrome extension to help with ADHD reading? Yes. Postlight Reader is the gold standard. It removes the clutter so your eyes don't skip around. Also, try BeeLine Reader—it colors the text gradients to guide your eye from line to line, which reduces reading fatigue significantly.
What is the best calendar extension for ADHD? None. Use your phone or a physical timer. Extensions get lost in the browser clutter. You need a physical device buzzing in your pocket (or a full-screen block like Stretchly) to break hyperfocus effectively.
How do I stop opening too many tabs? You don't. That is how the ADHD brain works—nonlinear and curious. Just use OneTab to clean them up periodically. Accept the chaos, just contain it.
