# A 20-20-20 rule app for Mac, feature by feature A 20-20-20 rule app for Mac counts the twenty minutes for you and puts a short look-away break on the screen, because the state where you need the reminder is exactly the state where you will not notice. - URL: https://swiftfox.studio/blog/20-20-20-rule-app-for-mac - About: https://swiftfox.studio/apps/recess - Published: 2026-07-13 - Updated: 2026-07-13 - Publisher: Swiftfox Studio (https://swiftfox.studio) ## In short - Recess runs eye rest and body stretching on two independent cadences, because one clock always gets one of the two wrong. - Presets set both at once - Standard is 2 minutes every 20 for the eyes and 5 minutes every 50 for the body - and every value stays editable. - Overlays cover every connected display, honour Reduce Motion, and hold entirely during Focus, Do Not Disturb, idle time and full-screen video. - Skipping an eye break adds 90, then 180, then 300 seconds to the next one within a rolling hour, and the whole penalty system can be switched off. ## What the 20-20-20 rule is, and why an app has to help Every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. That is the whole rule. It exists because the muscle that focuses your eye stays contracted the entire time you look at a screen at arm's length, and relaxing it briefly and often is what stops the ache that arrives around six in the evening. The rule is trivially easy and almost nobody follows it, for one reason: you cannot notice you have stopped noticing. Twenty minutes of concentration is precisely the state in which no internal signal fires. Something outside your head has to do the counting. [Recess](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/recess) is that something on macOS. Everything below is in the shipping version. ## Two timers, because eyes and body are not the same problem Recess runs **two independent cadences**. Eye rest wants to be frequent and very short. Standing up and stretching wants to be occasional and longer. Put them on one clock and one of the two is always wrong - either you are stretching every twenty minutes, which is absurd, or you are resting your eyes every hour, which does nothing. ![The Recess menu bar popover on macOS with separate Eye and Body countdowns, each with a progress bar and a Start break button, and today's break counts underneath](https://swiftfox.studio/recess/shot-1.jpg "Two countdowns, two progress bars, and a one-line tally of the day underneath.") The popover shows both counting down side by side, each with a **Start break** button if you want to take one early, a master toggle to pause everything, and a one-line tally: *Today: 4 eye ยท 2 body breaks*. Three presets set both cadences at once: | Preset | Eye break | Body break | |---|---|---| | Light | 45 s every 30 min | 3 min every 90 min | | Standard | 2 min every 20 min | 5 min every 50 min | | Strict | 90 s every 15 min | 5 min every 40 min | Every interval and duration is also editable directly, which turns the preset into a starting point rather than a cage. ## What a break looks like When one is due, an overlay covers **every connected display** - a second monitor you can keep working on would defeat the point - and states one instruction. ![The Recess eye break overlay filling the screen, reading Look away with a 20 second countdown and Skip, Postpone and Done buttons](https://swiftfox.studio/recess/shot-2.jpg "Look away, twenty seconds, and three ways out. The Skip button prints its own penalty on itself.") For an eye break it says **Look away** with a countdown in seconds. For a body break it says **Stand up.** with one in minutes. ![The Recess body break overlay reading Stand up with a five minute countdown and Skip, plus five minutes and Done buttons](https://swiftfox.studio/recess/shot-3.jpg "The body break is the same screen with a longer clock and a different instruction.") There is nothing else on the screen: no animation competing for the attention you are supposed to be resting, and the overlays honour the macOS Reduce Motion setting. Chimes at the start and end are optional. Three buttons sit at the bottom, and their labels are the design: - **Skip +90s** - it prints its own penalty on itself - **Postpone 5M** - available once per rolling hour - **Done** - ends the break early once the countdown has run ## The escalation, and why it is small Skipping an eye break adds time to the next one, and the penalty escalates inside a rolling hour: **90 seconds**, then **180**, then **300** for the third and beyond. An hour without a skip clears it. Skip three in a row and the app bounces its icon in the Dock, which is the loudest thing it ever does. Body-break skips are recorded but do not add to that pool, because five minutes of stretching is not a debt you can usefully accumulate. If the whole idea grates, **skip penalties can be turned off entirely** in Settings. A prompt you cannot argue with is a prompt you disable at the app level, and an app disabled at the app level helps nobody. ## What it does when you are not there Three checks stop Recess from asking you to rest from work you were not doing. **Idle detection** pauses both timers when you stop touching the machine, so a walk to the kitchen does not come back to a break you already took. **Focus and Do Not Disturb** hold breaks entirely. An overlay landing on a screen you are sharing in a meeting is the failure that gets a break app uninstalled within a week. **Video playback detection** delays a break during full-screen video, with a separate switch, because being interrupted twenty minutes into a film is not a health intervention. Two global shortcuts sit on top of all of it: **Command Shift B** starts a break now, and **Control Command P** pauses and resumes. The second uses Control rather than Shift on purpose - Command Shift P is private-window in every browser. ## What it records A **60-day log**, daily counters and a weekly report, all stored locally. Nothing is written to Apple Health and nothing is uploaded. The point of the log is the weekly shape, not a score. ## What it costs, and what else to look at Recess runs on **macOS 14 or later**, on Apple Silicon and Intel, and takes about 30 MB. It is **pay what you want** with a suggested price of $3, which includes paying nothing. The full specification is on [the Recess page](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/recess). Recess rests you on its own clock, regardless of what you are doing. If you would rather rest on your work's rhythm - a break earned at the end of a focus block - that is a Pomodoro timer, [Pawodoro](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/pawodoro). The other thing a desk quietly costs you is water, which is [Aqumi](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/aqumi). Both are covered together in [desk health apps for Mac](https://swiftfox.studio/blog/desk-health-apps-for-mac).