CaughtSlipping
A browser extension that holds both kinds of slipper accountable, the procrastinator and the workaholic. Live on the Chrome Web Store, free, with no account and no server.
Your phone nags you about screen time. The laptop, where the work happens and the distraction finds you, mostly does not. CaughtSlipping is a sarcastically honest friend that tracks where the hours actually went, then flips and tells you when you have not stopped.
Two kinds of slipper, one blind spot
Two kinds of people: the distracted and the overworker. I am both, on different days. Screen-time tools only nag the first, and they live on the phone. The browser is where work gets done, so it is also where distraction finds you.
So it is a friend with an attitude rather than a dashboard. Today's number arrives with a line matched to how deep you are, crossing a limit walls off the tab, and re-opening a site you have overdone triggers a three-second pause.
The hard part: most trackers quietly lie
Chrome's idle API watches your mouse and keyboard. Watch an hour-long show without touching anything and the browser calls it idle, so the tracker logs three minutes. A product whose promise is receipts cannot ship a number wrong in the user's favour.
Four rewrites fixed it: playing media counts with no input, forgotten tabs stop counting, and nothing commits past the last proof the machine was awake. Most of the engineering in the extension, none of it visible in a screenshot.
Caught Grinding: the alter ego
Work Mode inverts the product: instead of shaming wasted time it runs a Workaholic Check, anchored to published health research rather than a vibe.
- 55h
- The line that ends the argumentThe WHO and ILO put the health-risk threshold at 55 hours a week: 35% higher stroke risk, 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease. Cross it and the verdict jumps straight to workaholic, source cited on screen.
- Your hours
- Not a hardcoded eveningAfter-hours and weekend signals read the schedule you set. The same hour of YouTube means something different at 10am Tuesday and 9pm Saturday.
- 0 bytes
- Leaves your deviceNo account, no backend, no database. The app cannot sell what it never collects, which is also why every feature is free.
Four verdict tiers, from chill to workaholic, driven by after-hours work, weekend grind, no-break streaks and weekly load.
The gate I built, then deleted
Blocking, time limits and the pause all shipped behind a licence check. Payments were wired, the Pro tier existed, and it was the wrong product: an accountability tool that withholds the intervention until you pay is selling the diagnosis and charging for the cure.
The paywalled features were the ones that change behaviour, so the free tier was a guilt machine with no exit. Licensing came out, everything went free, and with no backend to fund that was affordable as well as right.
