I made a macOS tool to prevent me from working late hours
Hey HN, I used to be the poster child "10x" engineer. 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…
In plain words
This macOS tool helps users prevent working during late hours by setting boundaries on work time. It targets engineers and knowledge workers who struggle to disconnect from their jobs and work beyond reasonable hours. The tool addresses work-life balance by enforcing limits on when work can occur, helping users protect their personal time and mental health from the effects of overwork.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, I used to be the poster child "10x" engineer. 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 it doesn't really allow you to totally block an app. It only lets 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 at certain 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 developing my own solution. I made it for myself with zero commercial intentions, but I thought there might be others in this same situation who could benefit from it, so I decided to release it to the public as a free tool that tracks/requires no user info whatsoever. It improved my life and I hope it can be useful to someone else here too.
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