After moving I’m now trying to implement and get used to some new habits. The habit I try to modify, is hard to change though. It’s also late at night, so this needs to happen quite drastically.
Serious Break is based on Keyboard Cleaner Maestro. It functions similarly in its core, but has a mechanism added to run for a fixed period of time, rather than indefinitely like Keyboard Cleaner Maestro. Serious Break opens a TextEdit document, which you can actually edit with your keyboard, but your mouse will jump to the center of the screen if you’re trying to move it.
init (red): Setup process. SBDuration is the time, in seconds, Serious Break should be running. SBEndTime is a calculation of NOW + SBDuration. The document gets opened and its window will be zoomed.
wait loop (orange): A notification will confirm everything is set up and you can start whatever you are supposed to be doing. A until loop checks whether the current time (NOW) is equal to Serious Breaks’ calculated end time. As a security measure only, you can close this loop also by holding ⌃ for a moment.
clean up (green): Close TextEdit and the document (discarding all changes), delete all variables.
The macro runs once daily for 10 minutes. In the download version I’ve set the duration to 20 seconds though. So if you accidentally invoke it, you don’t have to wait 10 minutes until you can use your computer again.
Download Serious Break and the Black TextEdit file.