I built Greendot over the weekend
Remote work has a funny little trust problem: the green dot.
Somewhere along the way, this tiny status indicator became a proxy for work. Green means available. Yellow means suspicious. Grey means dead.
But work is not always typing. Sometimes it is reading a pull request, thinking through a messy problem, or walking around the room because staring at the screen is not helping. Slack does not know that. Teams does not know that. They just see no movement and quietly mark you as away.
So I built Greendot, a tiny macOS menu bar app that moves your cursor by two pixels, then moves it back.
That is the whole trick.
No account. No dashboard. No productivity score. No AI summary of your fake focus time. Just a small app that says: “I am still here. I am just thinking.”
There are already mouse jigglers, but most of them are too dumb. They wiggle while you are on a call, move while you are presenting, or keep you green at 11 PM, which somehow looks more suspicious than being away.
Greendot is a bit more polite. It pauses when your microphone or camera is active. It can respect work hours. It sits quietly in the menu bar. And when you are idle, it does the smallest possible thing.
Two pixels. Then back.
I like weekend projects like this. Small enough to finish. Real enough to care about. No roadmap. No stakeholder alignment. No meeting to discuss the meeting. Just an itch, a few hours, and the nice feeling of turning a tiny annoyance into a tiny product.
Anyway, that is Greendot. I put it here: greendot.pego.dev
It is not really about pretending to work. It is about not having to perform work while you are already doing it.
The dot can stay green. You can keep thinking.