20/200BlinkGuard20/100Look 20 feet away20/70Every 20 minutes20/50For 20 seconds20/40And your Mac will insist20/30Smart Pause · honest screen time · up to 5 Macs20/20No subscription · no account · your day stays on your Mac
- v1.0
- macOS 14+
- Universal binary
- 2.9 MB
- Free for 7 days
- Up to 5 Macs
A timer in the menu bar. A warning before it lands. A break you can't ignore.
Nothing else runs in the background asking for attention. BlinkGuard sits in the menu bar, counts down, and takes over the screen only when the interval is up.
Everything, without opening a window
The countdown, the cycle you're on, today's tally, and one click to break early, pause, or snooze. Right-click opens the same panel. Five icons along the bottom reach the rest of the app, and a sixth quits it.
Never yanked out of a sentence
A solid, readable heads-up ten seconds before the screen goes. Dismiss it and the break still arrives — or push it one, three, or five minutes and finish the thought. Snoozes are rationed, per break and per day, by numbers you set.
Twenty seconds the screen can't talk you out of
Full-screen, above everything, on every display at once. Three enforcement levels decide how easily you get out of it: Casual lets you skip straight away, Balanced holds the skip button back for five seconds, and Hardcore never offers it. Separately, a break can lock the Mac outright. Every fourth cycle becomes a longer stand-up break.
An hour on a call is still an hour of screen.
Most break apps pause the whole timer when they detect a meeting, so a day full of calls reports as a day off. BlinkGuard splits the two: the overlay is held back, the clock keeps running. An hour in a meeting and an hour of video is two hours of screen time, because it was.
| Detected | Break overlay | Screen time |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings or calls | held back | keeps counting |
| Video playback | held back | keeps counting |
| Screen recording or sharing | held back | keeps counting |
| Deep focus apps you list | held back | keeps counting |
| You paused it yourself | held back | keeps counting |
| Mac asleep, display asleep, screen locked | held back | stops |
| You stepped away from the keyboard | held back | stops |
Detected, not guessed
Calls and video are read from the audio processes actually running, not from a list of app names that goes stale.
Deep focus, your list
Name the apps that shouldn't be interrupted. Everything running is offered — no bundle identifiers to hunt down.
Idle is idle
Lunch, a locked screen, a sleeping display — the timer stops and the day's total doesn't lie about it.
A week you can actually read.
Hours at the screen against the target you set, with the share of breaks you kept printed under each day. Then app by app, site by site, and one rolling score that says whether the week is going the right way.
Screen Time and Breaks Kept
Example weekEye Score
Rolling 7 days68Fair
Your longest stretch today ran 1h 48m. A break every 20 minutes keeps it under an hour.
- By app and by site
- Ranked time per app, grouped into work, communication, browsing, media and utilities — and per domain for the browsers, over today, the last 7 days, or the last 30.
- Tasks that earn credit
- Mark a task active and every finished interval is credited to it. The break history says which task each break belonged to.
- History you can take with you
- Every break, with its outcome, the task it belonged to, and how many displays it covered. Export the lot as CSV, or keep it for thirty days and let the rest prune itself.
There is no server. There was never going to be one.
BlinkGuard has no analytics, no account, and no sign-in. It makes exactly one network request in its life — the one that activates your licence. Everything it records lives in a local database on your Mac, and you can delete all of it from Settings in two clicks.
What it records
- The name of the app in front, and how many seconds it was there
- Bare domains while you browse — github.com, not the page
- When each break started, how long it ran, and whether you kept it
- Task titles you typed in yourself
What it never touches
- Full URLs, page titles, or anything on the page
- Keystrokes, clipboard, screenshots, camera or microphone audio
- Analytics or telemetry — the one request it makes carries a licence key, nothing else
- Your identity — there is no account to create
Block it in Little Snitch the moment your licence is activated and nothing changes: the key is checked once, and the app never asks again.
Why not the free one?
Free break reminders are easy to install and easy to ignore — which is usually why they were free. BlinkGuard is built on the opposite assumption: that you will try to get out of the break, and that the hours you spend at the screen should be counted honestly whether or not you do.
- During a call
- Most break remindersPause the whole timer, so a day of meetings reports as a day off.
- BlinkGuardThe overlay waits. The clock keeps running, because you were still looking at a screen.
- Skipping a break
- Most break remindersOne click, as often as you like, and nobody counts.
- BlinkGuardRationed per day, recorded with its outcome, and it costs you points in the score.
- When the break lands
- Most break remindersA notification you can dismiss without reading it.
- BlinkGuardFull screen, above everything, on every display. Hardcore takes the skip button away and can lock the Mac outright.
- What you learn
- Most break remindersNothing. It was a timer.
- BlinkGuardTime per app and per site, tasks that earn credit, every break with its outcome, and CSV out.
- What it sends
- Most break remindersUsually an account, and a licence check on every launch.
- BlinkGuardOne request, ever: the licence key you paste in. No account, and nothing on launch.
- What it costs
- Most break remindersPer device, or per month, forever.
- BlinkGuard$19 once, on up to 5 Macs.
Written in Swift with no third-party dependencies and no bundled browser runtime — a universal binary that launches instantly and sits still in the menu bar.
Set it once, then forget the settings exist.
Defaults are the classic 20-20-20. If they don't fit your work, almost everything moves — and the ranges are enforced so you can't set a cadence that contradicts itself.
- Work interval
- 1–120 min · default 20
- Short break
- 5–300 s · default 20
- Long break
- default 5 min
- Long break cadence
- every 4th cycle
- Enforcement
- Casual / Balanced / Hardcore
- Snooze lengths
- +1 / +3 / +5 min
- Snooze quotas
- per break · per day
- Skip allowance
- per day, or none
- End break early
- optional, near the end
- Displays
- all at once · the count is recorded
- Lock screen on break
- optional · any level
- Launch at login
- SMAppService
- History retention
- 30d / 90d / 1y / forever
- Export
- CSV
- Appearance
- Light / Dark / System
- Requires
- macOS 14.0 or later
- Architecture
- Universal · Apple silicon + Intel
- Dependencies
- none
- Trial
- 7 days · the whole app
- Licence check
- once, at activation
- Licence
- one purchase · up to 5 Macs
- Distribution
- direct download
- Version
- 1.0
$19once, not every month
One licence, up to 5 Macs
Take the whole app for 7 days first — every setting, no account, no card. Then $19 once covers five Macs, which is under four dollars a machine, and there is nothing to cancel because there was nothing to sign up for.
Not yet notarised by Apple. The first launch needs Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
- Not on the App Store, on purposeThe sandbox forbids locking the screen and narrows how idle time is read. Sold direct so the app keeps both.
- One download, every MacA universal binary that runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel.
- One licence, five MacsThe laptop, the desktop, the machine at home — activate on up to five, no extra charge.