The 20-20-20 rule is a simple habit recommended by optometrists to reduce eye strain:
Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
The problem is that most 20-20-20 apps are so annoying that I end up disabling them within a week.
They interrupt you mid-thought.
They popup during meetings.
They remind you even if you just stepped away from your desk.
So I built Blink.
Instead of blindly firing timers, Blink tries to understand context:
🧠 in flow? it waits for a natural pause
🚶 away from your desk? timer resets automatically
🎙️ in a meeting? timer pauses
🤖 waiting for AI output? timer keeps running
The goal was simple:
build a break reminder smart enough that you forget it's running until the exact moment you need it.
Blink needs Accessibility permissions to work — which is a pretty big trust ask.
That’s why it’s fully open source.
You can see exactly what it does:
- reads input timing, never content
- no analytics
- no telemetry
- no network calls
Everything happens locally, and every line of code is public.
Once we squash the remaining bugs, I’ll push it to the App Store.
If you try it out, I’d love feedback.
And if this sounds interesting to you, contributions are very welcome.
Top comments (4)
this resonates hard. i built my own quit-smoking app (molt) for the same reason — every tool i tried was a day counter or motivational quote machine. nothing addressed the ritual moments that dragged me back. the context-aware approach is spot on. id love to see how you handle the pause detection logic
I'm very close to pushing it to AppStore - I'll keep you posted! :D
blink20.net
nice build! love the "every other one annoyed me" angle — thats exactly why i built my own thing too. i made a tracker called the moltai app after getting frustrated with all the existing ones just counting days without asking why i relapsed. same energy here 💪 do you find the browser popups actually effective or do people just dismiss them?