just-go-home

A waybar widget for Hyprland (and any modern Wayland/waybar setup — built and tested on Omarchy) that ends the workday for me, because I won't.

The widget escalates top-to-bottom: calm → warm → warning → urgent → flashing → shutdown. Notifications follow the same arc:

calm — hours out

warm — first reminder, 1 hour

warning — 15 minutes

urgent — 5 minutes

flashing — 30 seconds

shutdown — TIME IS UP

Why

Work expands. Family time doesn't. Without a forcing function, the day bleeds into the evening and the evening bleeds into nothing. just-go-home is the forcing function.

It is a ritual with teeth. The ritual is the countdown — the visible march toward the cutoff, the escalating colors and notifications. The teeth are the shutdown.

It defends the other side of the cutoff: personal life, family, the hours that don't belong to work and never did. The widget exists so those hours stop getting borrowed.

Principles

• Always visible. The ETA lives in the bar. Discipline is built from constant awareness, not from alarms.
• Escalation by color. Calm when the cutoff is far. Warmer as it approaches. Last minutes: flashing white and vivid red. The bar should make me uncomfortable on purpose.
• Notifications that lean in. [60m, 30m, 15m, 5m, 1m, 30s] and a final TIME IS UP! at zero. The cadence tightens; by the last minute the system is shouting.
• Then it shuts down. Not a lock. Not a sleep. A shutdown. The work session ends because the machine ends.
• Configurable pattern, not a single time. Weekdays at 17:00 today. Something else next quarter. The schedule is mine; the enforcement is not.

The escape hatch

There is one. I am not a fanatic. To postpone, I type — in sequence — a rotating phrase about the good things waiting for me if I leave on time. The override is not a password; it is a reminder. By the time I finish typing it, I usually don't want the override.

What it is not

• Not a productivity tool. It doesn't care what I got done.
• Not a focus timer. It doesn't protect the work; it ends it.
• Not gentle. Gentle didn't work.
• Not for anyone else. This is calibrated for one person on one laptop.

If the widget is on screen, the day has an end. If the day has an end, the evening is mine. That is the whole point.

Requirements

• Linux + Wayland
• Python ≥ 3.11 (uses tomllib)
• waybar — for the status bar widget
• mako (or any notify-send-compatible daemon supporting synchronous hints — replaces previous notification)
• systemd — systemctl poweroff is the shutdown mechanism
• For the click-to-postpone flow: a terminal reachable via xdg-terminal-exec and uwsm-app (Hyprland-with-uwsm setups, including Omarchy, get this for free). Adjust the on-click line in your waybar config if your setup differs — any terminal that runs just-go-home postpone works.

Install

./install.sh
just-go-home init

init writes ~/.config/just-go-home/config.toml and prints waybar/style snippets. Add the custom/just-go-home module to your waybar config.jsonc and the styles to style.css, then restart waybar.

Config

~/.config/just-go-home/config.toml:

postpone_minutes = 15

phrases = [
  "my children will not be small forever",
  "my wife deserves the best of me, not the rest",
  "the work will still be here tomorrow",
]

[[targets]]
days = ["mon", "tue", "wed", "thu", "fri"]
time = "17:00"

Optional: notification_messages (calm pool, eta > 60s) and urgent_notification_messages (eta ≤ 60s).

Behavior

• Widget: streaming JSON via just-go-home tick --loop.
• Color escalates calm → warm → warning → urgent → flashing → shutdown.
• Notifications fire at offsets [60m, 30m, 15m, 5m, 1m, 30s] plus a final TIME IS UP! at eta 0. Each replaces the previous in mako.
• 10s grace after the final notification before systemctl poweroff.
• Click the widget → floating terminal runs just-go-home postpone.

Postpone

Click the widget. The terminal asks you to type a randomly-chosen phrase from the config. Words are revealed one at a time as you finish the previous one. Wrong key → bell + red flash. Pastes are detected (rapid input) and rejected. ESC cancels. Successful entry shifts the target by postpone_minutes.

Commands

just-go-home tick [--loop]   # waybar JSON (one-shot or streaming)
just-go-home postpone        # interactive override
just-go-home status          # current target + eta
just-go-home init            # write example config + print snippets

Env

• JGH_DRY_RUN=1 — prints "would run systemctl poweroff" instead of actually powering off (for testing).