Your favorite websites come back at recess. Recess blocks the sites and apps that pull you away, and gives them back only during the breaks you schedule.
macOS 14 or later / Apple silicon / signed and notarized / 14 days free
Setup takes a few minutes
Websites, and optionally apps. During focus time the sites stop loading everywhere, and blocked apps are quit within seconds of opening.
Name your breaks, per weekday if you like, or start from a template and adjust the hours.
Choose a long, random password and hand it to someone you trust, then delete your copy. From here on, nothing changes without it.
Nine templates, each a known way of working. A template turns into ordinary break windows you can edit afterwards, with your own hours and days.
25 minutes on, 5 off. A longer break every four rounds.
Francesco Cirillo's technique from the late 1980s: 25-minute focus rounds separated by 5-minute breaks, and a 20-minute long break after every fourth round. The rounds start at the beginning of your work hours and repeat until they end.
50-minute periods, 10 minutes of recess, an hour for lunch.
The rhythm every school already runs on: a 50-minute class, 10 minutes of recess, repeat — with a full hour for lunch at 12:30. Familiar, forgiving, and easy to stick to.
52 minutes of work, then a 17-minute break.
From DeskTime's 2014 analysis of its most productive users, who tended to work in stretches of about 52 minutes followed by 17-minute breaks. Longer sprints than Pomodoro, and breaks long enough to actually leave the desk.
Ninety minutes of deep concentration, twenty of real rest.
Built on the ultradian rhythm: Nathaniel Kleitman's roughly 90-minute basic rest-activity cycle, which Ernest Rossi applied to work as 90 minutes of concentration followed by about 20 minutes of rest. Fewer, longer blocks for work that needs a run-up.
Four protected hours every morning, then the day opens up.
Cal Newport's rhythmic approach to deep work: the same protected block at the same time every day — about four hours, which is roughly as much deep work as a day holds — and the rest of the day open. Set your work hours to when the block should start.
Blocked during work hours, apart from lunch. Evenings and days off are open.
The classic nine-to-five fence: distractions are blocked while you work, with an hour off at lunch, and free once the workday ends. Nothing fancy — the schedule most people actually want.
Feeds go dark in the evening and come back in the morning.
Screens off before bed: the sites are blocked from the evening until the morning, every day, and open the rest of the time. Named after the habit of putting devices away when the sun goes down — the schedule for better sleep rather than more work.
Blocked around the clock on weekdays. The weekend is yours.
Monk mode, Monday to Friday: nothing comes back during the week, not even in the evening, and everything comes back on the weekend. Pick which days count as the week.
A single daily window. Focus time the rest of the day.
The strictest schedule that still has a release valve: one window a day — an hour in the evening by default — and the blocklist enforced the other 23. Good for a reset, or for feeds you want to keep but not live in.
The menu bar shows how long until your next break. During a break the countdown runs from green to red. In the last minute of any phase, a pill drops out of the notch and counts the seconds.
Before a break, the pill offers +5m, +30m, +1h or a custom delay. Postponing needs no password: delaying a reward only tightens the commitment.
Setup ends with a password. Make it long and random, write it down, hand it to someone you trust, then delete your copy. After that, nothing loosens without it: not the lists, not the schedule, not pausing, not uninstalling.
Everything you can do without the password only makes things stricter. That asymmetry is the whole design.
Need everything reachable for a while? Pause blocking for 15 minutes to 8 hours. It asks for the password every time, and blocking comes back on its own when the pause ends. Resuming early needs no password.
Postponing a break is the opposite: it delays a reward, so it needs nothing. The break keeps its full length, moves once, and the rest of the schedule stays put. You can never postpone focus time: that would be cheating, and cheating needs the password.
Blocking lives in a system service with administrator rights that restarts itself. Quitting the menu bar app changes nothing.
Blocked sites stop resolving wherever you open them, subdomains included. Blocked apps are quit within seconds of opening, and again if they come back.
A page that loaded before focus time does not get to stay. Every two seconds, tabs on blocked sites are closed, and a toast tells you so.
A VPN that brings its own DNS would normally slip past a blocker. Recess puts a small filtering resolver in front of it, inside the tunnel, so nothing leaks.
Add extra websites or apps that block during focus, during breaks (Slack and Mail, so the break actually heals), always, or in custom slots.
Not the lists, not the schedule, not even uninstalling. Without it you can only make things stricter: postpone a break, end one early, resume from a pause.
No account, no telemetry. Online only to activate a license and for a daily update check you can turn off.
Short 8-bit chimes mark the start of each break and focus block. Prefer it quieter? Switch to the softer Chimes theme, or turn them off.
No account. No telemetry. No crash reports, no usage pings. Recess goes online for two things only: activating a license, when you ask it to, and a once-a-day look for a new version that sends nothing but its own version number, and that you can switch off.
That's the whole list. The answer is a signed token the app checks offline from then on.
Recess is honest about where it stops. These are the real limits, in plain words.
Recess raises the cost of an impulse from one click to a deliberate, multi-step act. It is built for the person who set it up, not against an attacker.
Anyone with admin rights can ultimately work around any local blocker, this one included. The password gate and the self-healing make that slow and conscious, not impossible.
A browser that insists on its own encrypted resolver (Firefox with DoH forced on, for example) never asks the Mac to look up a name. Turn that setting off if you are serious.
A video that was already streaming holds a warm connection for a moment after a block starts. Recess flushes caches and closes the tab within seconds, not instantly.
Checkout opens with the download. $49 once, or €43.80 in Europe, taxes included.
No. One doomscrolling.sucks license is $49 once. It unlocks Recess and every tool that follows, on one Mac at a time. No account either.
The license. You buy a doomscrolling.sucks license, and it unlocks every tool in the suite, present and future. Today that is Recess. The key arrives by email from licenses@doomscrolling.sucks right after checkout.
Blocking continues exactly as configured. Only changing your lists or schedule needs a license. Letting the trial lapse is not a way out.
You can, and nothing changes. The blocking runs in a system service that keeps going without the menu bar app and restarts itself.
Yes, with the password. The uninstaller refuses to run without it while a configuration exists, by design.
By someone with administrator rights who is determined, yes. Recess is a commitment device: it makes cheating a deliberate, multi-step act instead of a reflex. The limits are listed above, in full.
No. It runs 100% locally. The only network call is license activation, which sends the key, a hash of your Mac’s hardware identifier, the Mac’s name and the app version.
Yes, one Mac at a time. On the old Mac open Settings, go to License and click Deactivate this Mac. Then activate with the same key on the new one.
Yes. When a VPN brings its own DNS resolver, Recess places its filtering resolver in front of it, inside the tunnel. Blocked names fail; everything else goes through the VPN as before.
No. Recess is a direct download, signed and notarized, because blocking runs in a system service that needs an installer with administrator rights.
No. Recess needs an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later.