I run a small online shop. Have for about a year now. Before that, I had a commute, an office, and somehow, more time with my kids than I have now.
Nobody warns you about this part. You picture working from home as being more present. What actually happens is you’re home, but you’re also in six tabs and two calls, and your kid has learned that “mom’s working” means “mom’s not really here.”
For a while I tried fixing this the hard way. Hourly check-ins, which fell apart by lunch. A “no phones after dinner” rule I couldn’t enforce because I was usually still working after dinner myself. Every fix I tried required me to remember to do it, which was exactly the thing I didn’t have spare capacity for.
My sister’s been doing the same kitchen-table-business thing for longer than I have, with a teenager in the house. I mentioned my “phones after 8pm” plan, half-joking about how bad I was at sticking to it. She laughed and said she’d stopped trying to manage it manually a long time ago. She just has something running quietly in the background instead.
That something is Bark.
It’s not a screen-time timer bolted onto a phone. It monitors texts, apps, and web activity, and it’s built to understand context rather than just flag keywords, so it’s not pinging you every time a word shows up, it’s flagging things that are actually worth a conversation. It also handles the boring stuff automatically: screen time schedules, blocking specific apps or sites, location check-ins. You set it up once. It doesn’t need you to remember anything after that.
For someone whose whole day is already made of things that need remembering, that’s the actual point. I didn’t need a stricter rule. I needed one less thing to hold in my head.
It took about ten minutes to set up on my daughter’s phone. I haven’t thought about it since which was the entire goal.
If you’re in the same boat (building something from home, guilty about the trade-off, out of bandwidth for one more manual system), this is where I’d start: Bark