Hi Product Hunt! I'm Bruno Rocha and I'm the solo dev of BurnoutBuddy. I used to be the poster child "10x engineer", as we like to call it. I always went far beyond the job description, actively involving myself in everything and having no issue working late hours/weekends/vacations if necessary to achieve my goals. I did this because I love engineering and it brought me a lot of career success, but it wasn't until recently that I realized this was actively destroying my life and leading me to an early death. Putting work above my own life completely ruined my social life, and eventually made me so stressed and anxious that it became impossible for me to relax and do anything in my life besides working myself to death. Even work itself was damaging me as I was then spending every single day (including weekends) under overwhelming stress for being unable to not accumulate extra work and responsibilities I knew I should be rejecting. I was in desperate need to stop being a workaholic, but I had zero self-control. I was so addicted that even though I knew I should lay back and relax, I would always end up checking Slack in the middle of night, get stressed, do some work I shouldn't be doing, and spend the entire weekend burned out. I needed my computer to actively stop me from doing so. I initially solved this by using Apple's own Screen Time feature, but they don't really allow you to *completely* block an app. They only let you limit how much you can use it on any given day, which was not sufficient to keep me in check as I truly needed the ability to completely disable certain apps after working hours. Some third-party productivity apps do have this feature, but they're paid and not geared towards work addiction (quite the opposite, actually), so I didn't want to pay a subscription to something that didn't fit my use case. I ended up solving this by creating my own tool: BurnoutBuddy. I created it primarily for myself, but since I thought there might be others in this same situation who could benefit from it, I decided to release it to the public as a completely free macOS menu bar app. ⚙️ Here's what BurnoutBuddy currently allows you to do: - Configure your working hours, and whether or not you have a day off - Configure the list of apps that should be blocked outside those hours - Get presented with alerts containing sassy messages from the tool whenever you attempt to work when you shouldn't - Be completely private, as the tool is completely local to your machine and contains no networking features besides the auto-updater itself (which can be disabled) 🚀 And here's what I want to do for the next updates: - Replace the current alerts with actual flowchart conversations where the tool attempts to convince you to leave your computer - Add more anti-burnout-related features, such as forcing regular breaks - Add mechanisms to avoid "cheating" (like temporarily editing working hours to unlock work apps) - Extend the blocking mechanism to also block websites Using BurnoutBuddy considerably improved my health. I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback, and I hope it can be useful to someone else here as well.

Kshitij Gupta

Very nice concept to help one stay focused

3yr ago

Bruno Rocha

Burnout Buddy

Maker

Jeremy Nagel

Focus Bear

@rockbruno congrats on the launch! RE screentime: it does completely block apps. You need to set a passcode though. It works quite well. My wife lost my passcode and I forgot my icloud password - no way past it lol.