Cold Turkey locks the door. Tolby asks if you meant to leave.

This post is from Tolby, which is one of the two apps it compares. Cold Turkey's site and user guide were checked on November 9, 2026.

The paper

It's 9pm and you have a history paper due on the Panama Canal. You open a doc, a JSTOR search, and the Wikipedia article on the canal. The first half hour goes fine.

At 9:40 you're still on Wikipedia. You followed a link to Ferdinand de Lesseps, then the Suez Canal, then a list of the largest ships ever built, and now you're reading about a cruise ship's water slide. Every one of those pages is on the same site as your best source. Your doc still has one paragraph.

Now try to fix that evening with a blocker.

If you block Wikipedia, you lose the paper's main source. If you allow it, you've allowed the rabbit hole too. Cold Turkey is more precise than most blockers. It can block a single page, any address containing a word, or one YouTube channel, and it can give you a set number of minutes on a blocked site. But every one of those needs you to name the rabbit hole before you fall into it, and at 9pm nobody knows it'll be cruise-ship water slides. The problem isn't which page you're on. It's what you're reading, compared with what you said you'd do.

Tolby starts from the other end. Before you started, you told it what you were about to do: "Panama Canal paper, finish the intro." Tolby reads your screen on your Mac and compares it with that sentence. While you're on JSTOR or the canal article, you hear nothing. Somewhere around the water slide, it asks a short question about whether this is still the plan. You answer it, then go back, change the plan, or carry on. If you decide the next twenty minutes are for cruise ships, that's allowed. You never have to explain yourself.

And if Tolby got it wrong, you say so in your own words: "that ship really is in my paper." That's part of why it asks instead of blocking: a wrong guess costs you a sentence, not your source.

What each one assumes about you

Cold Turkey is built on a clear idea, and its own site says it plainly: once you lock a block, it's "almost impossible to stop." You can lock a block until a set time, until you restart your computer, or behind a password someone else holds. Frozen Turkey locks the whole computer. The person who sets the block, calm and planning ahead, is trusted. The person who shows up at 9:40 wanting one more article isn't, so that person is locked out.

Tolby assumes the reverse. The person at 9:40 is the one who has to decide, and the most useful thing anyone can do for them is say, at the right moment, what they said they'd do. It can't stop you, by design. It asks, and the decision is yours.

Neither idea is naive. They're bets about where the failure happens.

Cold Turkey bets that you fail at the moment of temptation, so it removes that moment. That works when the distraction is a place you never need, like a game or a feed, and when you'll leave the lock alone.

Tolby bets that you fail because nobody asks. Nothing marks the moment you leave the work, so twenty minutes go by before you notice. A question at that moment is enough for a lot of people, and it doesn't need the work and the rabbit hole to live on different sites.

The most interesting thing in Cold Turkey

Cold Turkey has a lock called Random Text. To unlock a block, you type out a string of random characters, up to 999 of them.

That lock isn't a wall. It's a pause. It assumes that if you have to stop and do something tedious, you might change your mind. That's very close to Tolby's idea, with one difference: the random text doesn't know anything about you. It doesn't know you were writing about the canal or that you've been gone forty minutes. It makes you wait, and the choice is still yours afterwards, just later.

Tolby's question is the same pause with your own words in it.

Who should pick Cold Turkey

Pick Cold Turkey if any of these are true:

• Your distraction is a place you never need for work. If it's one game, one feed or one site, a block is simpler than a question, and it asks nothing of you.
• You want the choice gone. Some people don't want to decide in the moment, and that's a fine thing to want. Tolby can't give you that. Cold Turkey can.
• You're on Windows, an Intel Mac, or a Mac with less memory. Cold Turkey runs on Windows and macOS. Tolby needs a Mac with Apple Silicon and 12GB of memory or more.
• You don't want any app reading your screen. Cold Turkey works from a list. Tolby has to see the screen to know the canal article from the cruise ship.
• You'd rather pay once. Cold Turkey Blocker has a free version that blocks websites, and Pro is a one-time purchase. Tolby is free too, and Tolby+ is a subscription.

Who should pick Tolby

Pick Tolby if your rabbit holes start on the same sites as your work, if you've tapped past a limit or uninstalled a blocker, or if you'd rather have a question you can answer than a lock you'll end up working around.

That last one is personal. Blockers never worked for Tolby's maker. The ones he could live with had an "Ignore limit" button, and tapping it became a reflex. He didn't want one he couldn't get past. That isn't true for everyone, and if a blocker works for you, keep it.

What Tolby sees, and where it goes

Tolby reads your screen on your Mac, every time, and recordings and images never leave it. When Tolby's coach runs online, it sends text, never images.

That text is your plan, the chat, the coach's notes about you, the apps you've been in and their window titles, and a short note about what's on your screen. Before it's sent, card numbers, ID and bank numbers, and anything that looks like a password are filtered out. That filter catches what it recognizes, so it's a filter, not a guarantee. The privacy page has the details.

Tolby is free to download from tolby.app, for a Mac with Apple Silicon and 12GB of memory or more.