Activity

I was just chatting with a buddy who does a ton of late-night coding, and he turned me onto this dead-simple trick for dealing with “monitor glare fatigue” that I honestly can’t believe I didn’t think of sooner. You know when you’re working on a multi-monitor setup and that secondary screen is just sitting there, blasting your retinas with a bright white browser tab or a glowing wallpaper while you’re trying to focus on your main task? It’s like having a flashlight shined in your eye from the periphery. Instead of constantly reaching over to fumble with the physical power buttons—which eventually wear out or mess up my window alignment—I started using a basic web-based utility to just “black out” the extra glass.

It’s a total game-changer for deep-work sessions because it effectively turns your spare monitor into a non-distracting void. I’ve been using BlackScreen for this lately because it’s way faster than digging through my OS display settings or setting up a screensaver. You just hit the site, go full-screen, and suddenly that distracting second monitor is completely dark. It feels like my workspace just got physically bigger because the visual clutter is gone, and my eyes don’t feel nearly as “fried” after a six-hour stretch. It’s also surprisingly handy for a quick hardware check; with the room lights down and the screen totally dark, you can actually see if your panel has any of that annoying backlight bleed or stuck pixels that you’d never notice during the day.

If you’re a night owl or someone who gets easily distracted by blinking notifications on your side screens, you should definitely give this a shot. It’s one of those “minimalist” habits that sounds almost too simple to matter, but once you try working in a room where only your active project is glowing, you’ll realize how much energy you were wasting just ignoring the rest of your desk. It’s basically a digital “do not disturb” sign for your own brain.