Have You Lost Focus? How I Built a Screen Monitor to Catch Myself Zoning Out
In plain English
The problem I had: Some days I'm super focused, other days I'm super distracted. When distraction hits, I waste a lot of time unless I catch it early. The symptoms are always the same: daydreaming or "just 5 minutes in" YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
What I built: A screen monitor app that runs locally on my computer. If my screen doesn't change for 5 minutes, it pops up and asks "Have you lost focus?" It also triggers if I access certain distraction sites. I can configure which sites to watch, how long before it triggers, and what the question is.
The outcome: I now have a built-in circuit breaker. Instead of losing hours to distraction, I get interrupted and have to make a conscious choice. That pause is often enough to snap me back.
Nerd Speak
Some days I'm super focused, other days I'm super distracted.
On the days of distraction, if I don't take a moment to regulate my nervous system, I waste a lot of time.
The causes of distraction are many but the detectable symptoms are daydreaming or accessing YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
So, two days ago, I came up with a proactive plan for managing this.
I used Claude Code to create a locally running app that monitors my screen and if it doesn't change for 5mins, it pops up a message that asks "Have you lost focus?"
If I access YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and many other sites, it pops up with the same message.
What happens after I choose "Yes" is what I'm avidly experimenting with. The former was easy, now the real challenge begins.
As my first experiment, a "Yes" response leads to a second question "Want to connect with your Alignment Coach?" If I answer "Yes" to that, I immediately receive a call from a Voice AI Agent I created in VAPI.
I established pretty quickly that this approach was impractical because I wasn't able to pause and think without AI jumping in to ask another question. I also felt a looming pressure to think quick because every minute was costing me money. Not a lot (11 cents per minute), but it adds up. This pressure ended up working against me... my mind would just go blank!
So then I considered 3 more approaches to experiment with:
1) See if I could make AI not respond until I say "over" or "thank you", like when I'm using a walkie-talkie.
2) Build an AI Agent in n8n and send text/voice messages via Telegram, so that I can take as much time as needed to answer AI's question.
3) Skip AI altogether and just list all the states I find myself in (murky mind, scattered mind, bored, restless, tired, stuck, chasing certainty, feeling overwhelmed) and map each one to a corrective action. When I click "Yes" to "Have you lost focus?", the idea is that I would select the state and see the corrective action.
For my next experiment, I'm going with option 3 because it's all I really need.
Just because I can use AI, doesn't mean I should!
I've also added a bunch of Settings that I can configure such as the questions, idle time before the popup, and the Watched Apps. But I'll talk about them in a future update after I've done more testing.
Mark Reynolds
Learning by Building
What’s Mark Building?
Want to see what I’m building next? Join my email list and I’ll send my latest builds, messy updates, and solutions straight to your inbox.
QUICK LINKS
MARK REYNOLDS
I use AI to build custom tools that handle my boring, repetitive tasks. I’m on a mission to optimise my workflow and help you do the same.
Created with ©systeme.io