Become the boss of Twitter with this clever script to keep you from falling down social media rabbit holes.

Video Transcript

Do you ever find yourself opening an application for just a minute to do something and then look at the clock and realize you just spent two hours in it? We all have those little holes we fall into. So I have this idea of these Focus Scripts that kind of force you to get back to work when you get into those applications. For me, one of my pitfalls is Twitter. So I have a 2-minute Twitter timer. Let's create it.

I've got a group here called Focus Scripts, and I'll make this one downloadable as well. We're going to call this a Twitter Timer. And the trigger for me on this one is going to be an Application Trigger And it's going to be for Tweetbot, which is my Twitter application. And the trigger is that the application activates. That means it comes to the front of the screen. And all I do in that case is I'm going to run a timer. So we're going to use the pause script, and I'm just going to use 5 seconds for this screencast. But you know, if you wanted to make it two minutes, you'd make it 120 seconds. But you don't want to sit here for 2 minutes and watch me wait for this to go off. And then the next step you would do is you would hide the application. So we're going to look for the ability to hide a specific application. And, in fact, they have a Keyboard Maestro action called Hide a Specific Application, and we're going to make it hide Tweetbot. And then once again, because I just love putting text on the screen, I guess, I'm going to give myself a message: Back to work, Sparky!

All right, I've got them there. These are the steps. If Tweetbot activates, it's going to wait five seconds. Then it's going to hide Tweetbot and give me a message. Like I said, if you're using this under 5 write -- make it something more like 2 minutes or 120 seconds, but for this script we're going do it this way. All right, it's done. I'm going to go ahead and open up Tweetbot now. For those of you in my feed, thanks for texting me. Look at that, five seconds later, and it displayed text. The only thing that went wrong with that is it displayed text in the upper-right corner. I wanted to put it big on the screen. So, we'll say Display Text Large. Let's do it one more time.

Load Tweetbot. It's open for 5 seconds. It's going to close the application and tell me to get back to work. There we go. Like I said earlier, you can download this script. It's in the download button in this course. And I recommend recreating it for whatever applications are your specific kryptonite.

Downloadable Keyboard Maestro Scripts: