I already have an app that does this on Android (One Sec is the app) and it only inserts a "mindfulness break" for specific apps (e.g. Chrome and social media), and I came to the same conclusion you did.
It's grind when I just mindlessly tap to open the browser to search for something random. Lots of times, though, the browser opens when I want to do something quickly, e.g. I get an email and I need to open something in the browser, and it becomes a big annoyance. After a while I just started subconsciously ignoring it, which I think defeats the purpose.
It's a tough problem to solve - I want it to prevent me from doing "mindless scrolling", but not when I have an actual task to accomplish.
Having work and leisure mixed on a device or service is a pain.
I had tried to block Reddit but then I needed it when researching some programming stuff. Most conversations happen on Reddit these days so if you need to look something up for work to see what others are doing, chances are Google will give you Reddit links first especially if what you are searching for is relatively recent.
What I found is that I developed a muscle memory for just ignoring the block and overriding it.
Instead of allowing myself an override that so I could dismiss the block I had to just hard block all of Reddit by setting an PIN I immediately forgot and if I really need something I’ll use ChatGPT to summarize.
> I had tried to block Reddit but then I needed it when researching some programming stuff
I used to have this problem. But now I just use Claude to research any coding or similar stuff that I would have used reddit for. The quality is at least as good as reddit discussions. Now I've totally blocked reddit using NextDNS on my phone and laptop, and configured Kagi to not return any reddit search results.