Work-Rest Balance

i'm bad at taking breaks. i'd tell myself i'll get up after this one thing, then look at the clock and two hours are gone. my neck would be stiff and my eyes tired.

so i built something i can't just ignore. when a break starts, every tab gets covered until the timer hits zero.

scheduled breaks

work for 30 minutes, rest for 5. both are adjustable. you can also start a break right away, or tell it to stop after the next one.

the break screen

it covers every tab and you can't scroll. there's a countdown, and every 30 seconds a new tip shows up, like drink water or look at something far away.

no data collected

there's no server and no analytics. it only keeps your settings, in chrome's storage.

chrome shuts down an extension's background script when it's idle, so a normal timer in there can just stop. i moved the schedule to chrome.alarms, which wakes it back up.

sending a message to every tab when a break started kept missing some, mostly tabs that were still loading or ones i opened mid-break. now the break lives in storage and every page checks it when it loads.

it can't cover chrome's own pages, like the new tab page. and to get on the web store i had to explain why it needs access to every site, and write a privacy policy.