How to set a blink reminder in Chrome

What you’re setting up

A blink reminder is a small cue that tells you to blink, every minute or so, while you read or work. It matters because focused screen work lowers your blink rate, and more of the blinks that remain stop short of closing. In a 2015 study by Nosch and colleagues, a brief on-screen animation that people had learned to blink with raised their blink rate by about 7 blinks a minute.

In BlinkPause the cue is drawn on the page you’re reading: soft eyelids close a little over it (Lids), the page blurs and clears (Mist), or a small eye blinks from a corner (Peek). It never takes focus or blocks a click. Look-away breaks (the 20-20-20 rule) come on their own schedule, with a soft bowl and a spoken guide so your eyes can stay off the screen.

Choose the rhythm

The welcome offers every 30 seconds (for long, focused reading), every minute (suits most people) or every 3 minutes (a light touch). Settings also has 2 and 5 minutes. Under The blink you can choose the speed (quick, natural or slow) and, for Lids, the strength: Gentle, Clear or Full, which is how far the lids close. Every tenth blink is slow, a nudge to close your eyes all the way, and you can turn that off.

Look-away breaks come every 20 minutes by default, for 20 seconds. You can set them from 15 to 60 minutes apart and 20 seconds to a minute long, and a quiet heads-up comes ten seconds before each one. Three times a day a break can become a guided squeeze set (close, squeeze, open, fifteen times), which you can turn off under Look-away breaks.

Make it quiet at the right times

BlinkPause always waits while you’re away from the computer (no keyboard or mouse for 3 minutes) or in another app. Under Quiet times in Settings, During calls is on by default: when a call tab in Chrome, such as Meet, Zoom, Teams, Webex or a Slack huddle, has played sound in the last two minutes, there are no blinks and no breaks. Breaks also wait for fullscreen and video to end and for a pause in your typing; blinks carry on there unless you turn on In fullscreen or While a video plays.

Only at certain times limits it to your working hours on the days you choose, and Never on these sites keeps it still on a game, a design tool or anything else you list. To stop it for a while, use Pause in the toolbar pop-up (for 15 minutes, for an hour, until tomorrow, or turn off), or right-click the toolbar button for the three pauses.

If it doesn’t appear

Drawing on a page needs site access, which is optional and asked for in the welcome (Allow on all sites). Without it, the blink shows only on the eye in the toolbar, which is easy to miss, and the toolbar pop-up says so with an Allow button. You can also allow it in Settings, under Your pages.

Chrome doesn’t let any extension draw on its own pages: the new tab page, chrome:// pages such as Settings, the Chrome Web Store and the PDF viewer. There, if you allowed all sites, the eye blinks in a small pop-up under BlinkPause’s toolbar button, but only when you haven’t typed or moved the mouse for 15 seconds, so it never takes your keys. Otherwise the toolbar eye blinks.

If nothing happens at all, open the toolbar pop-up: its status line says why, for example Paused until 15:40, Quiet while you’re on a call, or Outside your hours. Preview plays the look on the page you’re on, so you can check it straight away.