Abhik Sarkar has released Unfocus, an open-source macOS app that prompts breaks across multiple monitors and keeps a local activity history, he said in a post on X. The app is built with Rust and Tauri and defaults to a 20-minute work interval and a 20-second break.
Unfocus enters a desktop break-reminder category that includes Stretchly, Time Out, BreakTimer, DeskRest and Workrave. Its approach centers on breaks and activity history without productivity scoring.
Users can set work intervals from 1 to 120 minutes and breaks from 3 to 30 seconds. During a break, the app shows a full-screen scene across multiple monitors. It also provides a rolling 24-hour record of active and away time and a 90-day calendar of break outcomes.
The app has no account, telemetry, cloud dependency or packaged-app runtime network calls, according to its README. Its presence detection relies only on keyboard and mouse idle signals and does not record keystrokes.
Sarkar said Unfocus can be installed on macOS with Homebrew. The command in his X post uses the unfocus cask name, while the README lists unfocus@beta.
The source code and artwork are licensed under MIT. The bundled Newsreader font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Unfocus is an individual open-source project by Sarkar. His day job is Director of Machine Learning at Cloudastructure Inc, where he leads a globally distributed team processing more than 7 million videos daily for real-time threat detection.
