The apps trading push-ups for screen time, and what the same idea looks like on a desktop.
A wave of phone apps now asks for the same thing: move your body, get your screen back. Pushscroll counts push-ups through the camera and trades them for scrolling time, and has passed 100,000 downloads on Google Play. PushUp Time runs the same loop on iOS and Android. UnlockFit does it on iPhone. Squats, planks, jumping jacks — reps counted automatically, minutes released in exchange.
The category has a name now. Active friction: something physical standing between the impulse and the app.
These apps work, and it isn't because the workouts are hard. Thirty seconds of squats changes nothing about your resolve. What changes is the reach.
Discipline fights the same battle every day and loses a little more each time. The goal was never superhuman focus. It's an environment that makes focus the default instead of the exception. Change what's within reach at the moment the urge arrives, and you stop needing the willpower you used to spend.
That's the whole mechanism. Not motivation. Distance between you and the thing.
Every one of these apps lives on a phone. That made sense — the phone is where doomscrolling was born, and where screen-time APIs made blocking straightforward.
But the phone isn't where most work gets lost. On a desktop the problem is harder, because the machine you're distracted on is the machine you work on. You can't leave it in another room. Closing it isn't an option when your job is inside it.
Browser extensions don't hold either. An extension lives inside the browser, and the browser is just another program you control. Chrome is blocked, so you open Edge. The site is blocked, so you open a private window. Three clicks in a settings menu removes the extension altogether — and at three in the afternoon, three clicks is not a barrier. It's a formality.
Then there's everything that was never a website. Steam. Discord. A game already sitting on the desktop. An extension can't see any of it, because none of it passes through the browser. The hours don't only go to the feed. They go wherever the resistance is lowest.
Coregent runs on Windows and macOS at the system level. Not an extension, not a browser add-on. Sites, apps, games, entire categories — what you block stays blocked, whichever browser you reach for.
There are two ways to slow yourself down. Friction adds a pause before a site opens: five seconds, thirty, five minutes. Long enough for your brain to catch up to the impulse. Blocking removes the option outright.
Both run on a schedule you set once — work hours, deep-focus blocks, sleep windows. A Pomodoro timer is built in, with no exit until the session ends. Twenty-five and five, fifty and ten, whatever rhythm your work takes.
A blocklist you can edit is a blocklist you will edit, at the exact moment you shouldn't. Regent Mode closes that door. It freezes your restrictions and your schedule before the urge arrives. Nothing can be edited. Nothing can be switched off.
To change them, you connect Strava and log a run or a workout. Nothing opens until the activity lands. The impulse that sent you looking for an escape rarely survives the first kilometre.
When training isn't possible, quotes do the same work. You retype them by hand, word by word, no paste. It takes long enough for the craving to lose its grip.
Say it's exam season. Or the last month before something you've been building has to ship.
Sunday evening, before any of it starts, you build the list — every site and app that has quietly taken an evening from you this year. You set the hours: nine to six, plus the two after dinner. Then you seal it with Regent Mode.
Tuesday, three in the afternoon. The chapter isn't moving and the urge arrives on time. You reach for the tab. Nothing. You try the other browser. Nothing. You open the settings to grant yourself fifteen minutes, the way you always have, and the fields are frozen. The version of you that made the rules on Sunday isn't available for negotiation.
Two options are left. Go back to the chapter, or put your shoes on and log a run, the only thing that makes those settings editable again. Most afternoons, you go back to the chapter. That's the point.
Worth saying plainly: this is a heavier ask than ten push-ups at your desk. A logged Strava activity isn't something you produce in ninety seconds between two emails.
That's deliberate. On a phone, the exchange is small and repeatable by design — reps for minutes, all day long. On the machine where your work lives, a barrier you can clear ten times before lunch isn't a barrier. Regent Mode isn't selling minutes back to you. It's a lock, and the workout is the key.
Coregent is free to download for Windows and macOS. Get it here. It runs entirely on your machine — no account, no cloud sync, and no record of what you block, as covered in our security notes.