ScreenOn Timer

In a world growing increasingly dependent on technology, many seek to reduce their screen exposure in an attempt to focus on more productive hobbies and self-development-related activities, which is where a lightweight utility known as ScreenOn Timer comes into play, allowing you to maintain awareness of how much time you spend on your computer and to finish assignments in shorter time spans.

Once installed, starting up the app will summon a semi-transparent slate gray rectangle near the bottom right corner of your main monitor’s screen, just above the taskbar, displaying the elapsed time since its activation in both minutes and seconds for increased accuracy. For your convenience, the program is set to start up concomitantly with your system, thus sparing you of an extra shortcut to initialize at boot time, in order to stay aware of the time spent in front of your computer.

When it comes to time-constrained tasks, keeping an eye out for the remaining minutes can be crucial for submitting projects within the established deadline, which is why the program’s overlay gains an orange hue after one hour to act as a visual cue regarding the remaining two hours, ultimately turning red at the end of the three-hour period to notify the user that their time is up.

The rectangular display can be resized to take up less space and minimize its footprint on users’ workspace, or stretched across the taskbar’s time and date area to let users focus on the elapsed time. Right-clicking its dedicated system tray icon allows you to exit the program or minimize the overlay if it gets too distracting in the long run, and resort to the option of hovering the cursor over the logo to receive a notification with the elapsed time only when you need it.

In terms of improvements, the overlay’s refresh rate could be increased, since it is currently tied to any sort of keyboard input in order to show the updated elapsed time, while the notification feature does not always seem to work roughly 10 minutes after starting up the app. Finally, an option in the context menu to disable the automatic start-up would let users avoid going to the Task Manager’s dedicated section to manually stop it from executing the feature.

Whether you wish to actively decrease the amount of time spent browsing the internet on your computer, or you find yourself falling prey to distractions when having to work on a certain project, ScreenOn Timer might be a good solution, thanks to its colored overlay that acts a visual cue for the elapsed time while using your device.