Unhooked from YouTube

Posted on May 1, 2025

I regularly find myself distracted by YouTube. I often start watching a video and then get lost in the endless videos that I never intended to watch. One time, I opened YouTube to search a tutorial while doing a project. But before I could open the search box, the algorithm (who knows me too well) presented a dozen of interesting videos. By the time I noticed, I’d watched an hour of unrelated videos and had no clue what I was doing in the first place.

That changed after I started using Unhook. It’s saved me hours and made me more intentional about how I spend my time on YouTube.

Unhook is a Chrome extension that removes distractions from YT. I discovered it from a productivity YouTuber and I’ve been using it for a while now. It has completely improved my YouTube experience. With this extension, you can hide the clutter - homepage, shorts, notification, and all the other feeds (explore, trending, subscriptions, etc). Now all I see on YT main page is the search box. No noise. Just what I came for.

But let’s say you picked a video intentionally. Great. You’re laser-focused and ready to absorb all the information. Except … now the sidebar is full of other “better” and more interesting videos. Before you know it, you’re deep in the comments section, 3 recommended videos away from the first one. What I want to say is things like sidebar, mixes, comments are also distractions around the video player and they can also be removed.

Unhook can hide just about everything on YT and it’s highly customizable. You can completely remove the video sidebar, but you can also choose to hide just recommendations.

Below is my personal preferences:

  • Hide all the feeds (home, explore, trending, subscriptions)
  • Hide shorts, notifications, comments and mixes
  • Hide sidebar content except playlists (I watch series of tutorials)
  • Hide end screen feed
  • Disable autoplay and annotations

I recommend you to try it out for at least a few days. You’ll be surprised how much time you save and how much more focused you are. You can always choose to turn on certain distractions as you like. But this time, you’re being intentional about it and I consider that’s a win.