every 20 min
Repeating
Measured from the last time it fired, so finishing early resets the clock instead of leaving the next one stacked on top of you.
Menu bar app · macOS 13+
Some reminders should whisper. One should stop everything.
Pauselet keeps recurring reminders — pressure relief, water, medication, a stretch, a phone call — and lets you set, for each one, how much of your attention it is allowed to take.
Download for macOS
Free and open source · Signed and notarised by Apple · No account
Weight Shift
Activate your glutes and redistribute your weight.
Pauselet
Drink Water
Have a glass of water.
Pauselet Time Sensitive
Take Medication
Evening dose, with food.
Tilt Back
Tilt your chair back for 5 minutes. Stop working and listen to calming music.
5:00
remaining
Snooze
Finish Early
Four volumes
Frequent reminders have to be quiet, or you learn to ignore them.
Every reminder in Pauselet carries a volume, and the volume is the whole design. A prompt that arrives three times an hour has to cost you nothing. A prompt with a medical consequence behind it has to be impossible to scroll past.
-
Subtle
A small silent card in the corner. It never steals focus and disappears by itself.
For the twenty-minute weight shift — the one you get dozens of times a day.
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Normal
A standard macOS notification, in Notification Centre with everything else.
For water, posture, a break, Sunday's phone call home.
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Important
A notification with sound, marked time-sensitive so it can reach you through a Focus.
For the things you should not miss while you are heads-down.
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Critical
A full-screen overlay on every display, which stays until you acknowledge it.
For pressure relief, medication — anything with a consequence attached.
Critical
When it matters, it takes the screen.
The hourly tilt reminder is the reason this app exists. It dims every display and stays there until you answer it — no dismissing it out of the corner of your eye, no finding it later in a list of things you missed.
There is a countdown, because stop working for five minutes should be a finite instruction with an end you can see, not an open-ended one you abandon after ninety seconds. Snooze if you truly cannot stop now; it will come back.
Quiet hours can silence everything else overnight and still let critical reminders through. That is the default, because a pressure-relief prompt at 2am is still a pressure-relief prompt.
Schedules
Three ways to repeat, and they behave the way you'd expect.
17:00 · every 2 days
Daily
A set time, every N days. "Every second day" stays in phase rather than drifting a day each time you miss one.
18:30 · Sun Wed
Weekly
A set time on the weekdays you pick. Good for the reminders that belong to a day rather than an interval.
Give a reminder a duration and it counts down while you do the activity, so you know when you're done rather than guessing.
If your Mac was asleep when a reminder was due, it fires late rather than vanishing. Snooze is authoritative: it brings a reminder back even when the next natural slot is further away.
At a glance
One click tells you what's coming.
Pauselet lives in the menu bar. Click it and you see what's next and how long you have. Tick something off early, flick a reminder off for the afternoon, or pause everything — resuming re-anchors the intervals, so you don't get a backlog dumped on you at once.
- Pause for 30, 60 or 120 minutes, or indefinitely
- Complete a reminder before it fires
- Toggle any single reminder without deleting it
- Opens with the keyboard, works with head-pointer and switch input
Next up
Weight Shift
19 min
- Tilt BackEvery hour 42 min
- Weight ShiftEvery 20 min 19 min
- Drink WaterEvery hour 42 min
- Stretch & Range of MotionEvery 2 days at 17:00 —
- Call MumSun, Wed at 18:30 Sun
Pause…Settings
The rest of it
The details that decide whether you're still using it in a month.
Quiet hours
Set a range and everything goes quiet — with an option, on by default, to let critical reminders through anyway.
Snooze that means it
It brings a reminder back on your terms, and fires late rather than disappearing if your Mac was asleep.
Preview before you commit
The editor shows you exactly how a reminder will appear on screen before you save it.
Per-reminder on-screen time
A longer message can be given longer to read, for the subtle cards Pauselet draws itself.
Help on every setting
An (i) button beside each preference explains what it does — on a click, not a hover, so it works with head-pointer, switch and keyboard input.
History and adherence
See how often each reminder actually got completed, which is the only honest measure of whether the volume you chose was right.
Launch at login
A reminder app you have to remember to start is not much of a reminder app.
Bring your own reminders
Name it, pick an icon, choose the schedule and the volume. Each volume explains what it will actually do, so the choice isn't a guess.
Music
“Stop working and relax” lands better once the music has already started.
Paste a Spotify playlist link into Preferences and any reminder can play it. Pauselet launches Spotify if it isn't running and fades the volume up, rather than starting at whatever it was left at last night.
Each reminder chooses for itself: no music, the default playlist, or one of its own. Calm piano for the tilt-back reminder; something with a pulse for a movement prompt.
This drives the Spotify app on your own Mac through AppleScript. macOS asks for permission while you're saving the playlist, not an hour later in the middle of a reminder — and if you decline, reminders still fire, just without music.
Who it's for
Built for pressure relief. Useful for a great deal more.
Pressure relief
Weight shifts every twenty minutes, a five-minute tilt every hour. Quiet when it's frequent, unmissable when it's not.
Medication
Doses that have to happen at a time, on the days they're due, whether or not you're in the middle of something.
Hydration and movement
Water, standing up, range-of-motion work — the small maintenance that only helps if it's regular.
Screen and posture breaks
Look away, unclench your jaw, fix your shoulders. Frequent enough that it has to stay out of the way.
Physio and exercises
The home programme you were given and stopped doing in week three, on the weekdays it belongs to.
Calling people
Sunday, 18:30, ring your mum. Not everything a reminder is for has to be clinical.
Your data
It never leaves your Mac, because it never goes anywhere.
There is no account, no sync, and no network code in the app at all. Your reminders and your history live in one plain JSON file — readable, editable, backup-able, and yours.
~/Library/Application Support/Pauselet/data.json
{
"reminders": [{
"title": "Tilt Back",
"message": "Tilt your chair back…",
"schedule": { "interval": { "minutes": 60 } },
"priority": "critical",
"activityDurationSeconds": 300,
"isEnabled": true
}]
}About
Why this was built.
In August 2022, a spinal cord injury left Chris — who wrote Pauselet — paralysed from the shoulders down. Among the many things that changed, one is small enough to sound trivial and isn't: sitting still. For a wheelchair user, staying in one position is how pressure injuries start, and pressure injuries put people in bed for months.
The prevention is unglamorous and relentless. Shift your weight roughly every twenty minutes. Tilt the chair back for five minutes every hour. Every day, for the rest of your life, while you are also trying to work.
Reminder apps were the obvious answer and the wrong one. They fire every reminder at the same volume, so the hourly tilt — the one with a hospital admission behind it — arrives looking exactly like a notification about a software update, and gets swiped away with the same flick of attention. Turn them up and the twenty-minute nudge becomes unbearable. Turn them down and the important one gets missed.
So Pauselet makes the volume the thing you choose, per reminder. The frequent ones whisper. The one that matters dims every screen you own, counts down five real minutes, and waits. That distinction is the entire app; everything else is in service of it.
It works just as well for anyone with something to remember on a schedule, which is why it's free, open source and has no account attached. If it turns out to be useful for your own routine, that's the point.
Download
Get Pauselet
Unzip it, drag Pauselet.app to your Applications folder, and it will
open without a Gatekeeper warning — the released build is signed and notarised
by Apple.
- Requires macOS 13 or later
- Price Free, MIT licensed
- Data collected None
- Source github.com/Crypto69/pauselet
macOS asks for notification permission the first time it runs. If you decline, or the prompt never appears, the Normal and Important volumes fall back to Pauselet's own on-screen card — nothing is silently dropped either way.