(Load the unpacked extension into Google Chrome and activate it to save your eyeballs)
Every Sunday morning, a notification pops up on my phone, letting me know in a friendly way that I've spent too much time on my phone in the previous week — it doesn't tell me that directly, but the 3, 4, sometimes 6 hours are just enough to convince me that I'm completely addicted to it. Worse even, on my computer, the figure is even larger, regularly coming in at 7 hours. It makes a bit more sense given that everything I do now is on there, from class, to communicating with friends, to entertainment, but it's nonetheless frightening.
Over the summer, while I was mostly trapped at home with my family, I slowly started taking on healthier habits when it came to spending time outside and trying to feed my brain with better things than memes and vines. One of the side effects of that was forcing myself to close my laptop for longer than I normally would. Unfortunately, even if this had been something I was happy about, I still couldn't rip myself away from it most times, because I had obligations like schoolwork and an internship that just couldn't be done offline.
After the summer, I'd made no progress with my horrendous screen time (didn't even bother to buy blue light glasses). And with zoom school in the fall (and now spring), I feel myself frying my eyes out every day, alongside my attention span. With the knowledge that when we look at screen, we blink less, and the fact that my eyes are invaluable to the profession I've chosen to pursue, I've started to give way more of a hoot about my eye health.
So, this extension is my way of actually forcing myself to do the thing where you look away from your screen for 30 seconds every 20 minutes — if I can't have the discipline to step away myself, why not make the computer have the discipline for me?
This extension was born out of the need for a break. I'm blessed and cursed with the ability to keep working on projects for a long period of time without stopping (just the casual interruption to look at my phone, re shot attention span). This means that pretty much the only way to get me to take breaks every once in a while is to give me no other option.
What it does is warn you every 30 minutes that you should take a 20 second break to look elsewhere — maybe at your window, at nature, or even at your desk — just anywhere that isn't going to burn your retinas in the long term. It'll make some white blobs appears and give you a little annoying message that lets you know that it's time to go, and when you accept the message (there's no other button except "ok"), it'll blur the screen for 20 seconds, actually forcing you to leave your workspace (or snap you out of a YouTube rabbit hole).
My hope for this extension is that it will nudge people to think about how much time is sucked by their technology. 30 minutes can fly by really fast if we're not being mindful of what exactly we're doing on our computers, and sometimes it's nice to have a gentle reminder that we should be taking care of ourselves.
Now, if only there were a way to prevent me from looking at my phone while the 20 seconds are ticking...