Why greyscale makes distracting sites less tempting

Greyscale makes distracting sites less tempting because much of their pull comes from colour: bright thumbnails, red notification badges and saturated photos are designed to grab your attention. Remove the colour and the same page looks flatter and less rewarding, so you're more likely to leave and less likely to open it in the first place. It doesn't block anything; it just turns the volume down.

Colour is part of the hook

Apps and feeds use colour deliberately. Notification badges are red because red stands out. Thumbnails are bright and high-contrast because they win clicks. Our eyes are drawn to saturated colour before we've decided anything, which is exactly what a feed wants.

Many people have tried the "greyscale phone" trick, turning their phone's display to black and white, and found that scrolling simply feels less interesting. The content is the same; the reward is smaller. The effect varies from person to person, but it's a cheap experiment with very little downside.

Why only some sites

Turning your whole screen grey makes work harder too: charts, design work and colour-coded calendars need colour. The better approach is selective: grey only for the sites that pull you away, full colour for everything else. Your work stays vivid; your feeds go quiet.

How to make sites greyscale in Chrome

Chrome doesn't have a built-in setting for this. Your options:

• Operating system filters: Windows and macOS both have colour filters in their accessibility settings, but they apply to the whole screen, not one site.
• An extension: the practical way to grey out specific sites.

TabHue includes this as dimming (Pro). Edit a category, switch on Dim these sites, and every site in that category, such as your feeds, video and news, shows in greyscale. Tabs you moved into that category by hand turn grey too.

A note on permissions: changing how a page looks requires access to websites, so Chrome shows a broad-sounding warning. TabHue doesn't ask for it when you install; it asks only when you turn dimming on, and it uses the access only to apply the grey filter. It reads the page's address, never its content. More in Dimming distracting sites.

Combine it with other habits

Greyscale works best as one layer among several:

1. Park the most tempting sites during focused work (parking distracting tabs).
2. Grey out the ones you do keep open.
3. Turn off their notifications.

Each layer removes a little pull. Together they make focus the easy default.

Frequently asked questions

Does greyscale really reduce screen time?

For many people it reduces the urge to keep scrolling, though results vary. The best way to know is to try it on your two or three most distracting sites for a week and compare your time; see how to track your browsing time.

Can I make just one website black and white?

Not with Chrome's own settings. You need an extension that applies a greyscale filter to chosen sites, such as TabHue's dimming.

Is greyscale bad for accessibility?

It only applies to the sites you choose, and you can switch it off at any time. If you rely on colour to read a site, leave that site out.