Slow

An app that cares for your mental health

• Only for Mac at the moment!

Slow is an app to remind you how much you are using your computer. I made it thinking on the mental health problems arising with the new AI addictions and psychosis.

It does something simple:

• Blinks light every cycle (default 60 min)
• After total time (default 8 hours) makes your screen brightness go dark.

Additionally:

• It tracks which app and window name your are using
• it keeps it in an SQLite locally
• You can ask for usage

It has two loops to achieve that using Go, with minimum impact to your machine (8M of RAM the whole app)

Install

Connect first with my tap repository.

brew tap gabesoler/tap

Call it with trust, as still a new home brew

brew trust --cask gabesoler/tap/slow

brew install --cask slow

Use

For it to run both loops

When using slow or command dim, you can pass flags 'duration' and 'cycles' to customise the blinking behaviour.

slow

Imagine you want to work for four hours you can pass:

slow -d 30 -c 4

With this configuration your computer will blink every 30 minutes for 4 cycles. Mid way it will increase 20% darkness.

This aims to give you feedback of how much time is passing while working. After the desired time, the screen will go darker and you can run the usage command to see where you have been.

To check the records

To check your use you just type 'slow usage'. You can pass the flag '--back' or '-b' to say how many days back to search in the database. I added not just time, but also the amount of times you have switched from the same window, as it shows attention fragmentation and concentration.

slow usage 

Example

APP	WINDOW	TOTAL TIME	TIME AV	SWITCHES
Ghostty		2.1 s	2.1 s	1
Arc		0.6 s	0.6 s	1
None	None	0.3 s	0.3 s	1

You can add the flag --markdown or -m to display as markdown (what I used here)

Only app tracking

You can also run the tracking loop alone:

slow track 

To only do Dim loops (may feel more secure)

And the Dim loop alone (same flags can be set up)

slow dim