Night Block
Night Block is OterApp’s evening shutdown. At a time you choose, the home screen swaps from “what’s next” to “what just happened” — a quiet space for a short journal entry, with the rest of the app intentionally out of reach.
What it does
When Night Block activates, the dashboard is replaced by a Night Block screen with your journal prompts for the day. The intent is to make it easy to wind down, hard to keep grinding, and impossible to forget that the day has ended.
Activation can be:
- Automatic — every evening, when the current time crosses your configured Night Block time.
- Manual — toggle it on at any moment from the Night Block settings.
Configuring the schedule
In settings, set your Night Block time (default 20:30). Once the current time is at or after this point, the next app open shows the Night Block screen instead of the dashboard.
You can change the time at any point — it takes effect from the next check.
Override
If you need the app back before the morning — a late task, a tracker you forgot to log — you can override Night Block. The override asks for a short reason and is recorded as the last override reason. The friction is the feature: writing down “why I’m breaking my own boundary” is a quiet check-in with yourself.
The override turns Night Block off for the rest of the evening. It re-arms automatically the next day.
Whitelisted habits
Some habits belong inside the evening (a wind-down stretch, a reading log, the journal itself). Add them to your Night Block whitelist in settings. Whitelisted habits stay visible and check-in-able even when Night Block is active; everything else stays behind the curtain.
Tips
- Pick a time you would actually like to stop. Not the time you currently stop. Night Block is more useful as a goal than as a confirmation of present habits.
- Whitelist sparingly. Each whitelisted habit is a hole in the wall. Two or three is usually plenty.
- Use override reasons honestly. They’re for you, not a score. Patterns in your overrides are useful data for adjusting the schedule.
Our approach
Night Block treats the end of the day as a design problem, not a discipline problem. The science says boundaries hold better when they’re enforced by structure — not willpower.