Developers don’t always choose to stay up late. Sometimes we just forget what time it is.
Developers don’t always choose to stay up late. Sometimes we just forget what time it is.
You start coding after dinner.
You tell yourself:
“I’ll finish this one thing.”
Then you fix another bug.
Then another.
You finally look at the clock.
2:17 AM.
I think this happens to a lot of developers.
It’s not always about discipline.
Sometimes you’re just so focused on building that you completely lose track of time.
That’s why I built SleepLock: Must-Sleep Alarm.
It’s a bedtime alarm designed for people who are very good at ignoring normal reminders.
When bedtime arrives, SleepLock doesn’t just show you a notification you can swipe away.
You need to put your iPhone face down for a few continuous seconds to complete the bedtime action.
The idea is simple:
Stop coding.
Put the phone down.
Go to sleep.
No complicated sleep analysis.
No endless health charts.
No productivity system.
Just a small interruption at the exact moment when you probably need someone — or something — to remind you:
It’s late enough. Ship tomorrow.
If you often get lost in coding and suddenly realize it’s 2 AM, you might understand why I made this.
SleepLock: Must-Sleep Alarm
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6799816048
If it genuinely helps you stop earlier and sleep better, I’d really appreciate an App Store review.
And I’m curious:
How often do you lose track of time while building something?
Love the focus on keeping it completely unbloated. 90% of sleep apps on the App Store try to sell you a subscription, track your REM cycles, and bombard you with graphs you don't care about. Most developers don't need another health dashboard telling us we're tired—we just need a simple tool that tells us to step away from the code.
I believe that once you enter a state of flow, it is indeed very easy to lose track of time; however, fully entering that state is difficult, and after experiencing it once, it is hard to achieve that same level of total focus again in the short term.
I agree. Sometimes you get in a flow or an idea or solution pops in your mind and you have to keep going.
But I think this product will be good for those times you go down research or exploratory rabbit holes where you just lose track of time.
The face-down interaction is a nice constraint because it turns the reminder into an action rather than another notification to dismiss. The interesting question is whether that small interruption is enough to actually break the coding flow when someone is deeply focused.