Eyecares

Staring at a screen is not bad for your eyes because of the light. It is bad because of what your eyes stop doing: when you focus on something close for a long stretch, the muscle that changes your lens stays contracted, and your blink rate drops by roughly half. The result is the familiar end-of-day combination — tired, dry, slightly unfocused eyes, and often a headache that has nothing to do with the work itself.

The 20-20-20 rule fixes both at once. Every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Looking far away lets the focusing muscle relax, and the pause is long enough that you blink normally again. It is recommended by optometrists precisely because it is small enough that people actually do it.

The catch is that the rule requires you to notice 20 minutes has passed, and the whole reason your eyes are strained is that you were absorbed in something. That is the part Eyecares handles: it counts, and it tells you.

Most break reminders fail the same way. They interrupt at a fixed interval regardless of what you are doing, you dismiss them during something you cannot stop, and after a week you disable the app. Eyecares is built around that failure: intervals are fully customisable, so you can match the rhythm of your actual work rather than a number someone else chose.

The reminder itself is designed to be noticeable without hijacking the screen, and Apple Watch support means it can arrive on your wrist instead — a gentle tap you can act on without picking up your phone and undoing the point of the break.

There is also a Lock Screen and Home Screen widget showing where you are in the current interval. Knowing a break is four minutes away is often enough to reach a natural stopping point rather than being interrupted mid-thought.

Eyecares keeps eye-strain statistics: how many breaks you took, how many you skipped, and how your screen sessions are distributed across the day. This is the part most people find changes their behaviour, because the pattern is usually not what they assumed.

A typical discovery is that the problem is not total screen time but one unbroken three-hour block in the afternoon. That is a much easier thing to fix than "use screens less", and it is the kind of thing you only see once something is counting.