I firmly believe that having regular breaks from long work sessions is a necessity. We work sitting long hours without much movement. It’s often we forget to take long or short breaks when we work on a task that occupies our brain. Also sometimes it’s hard to break a focus session.
Without a tool reminding us of the breaks, it’s very difficult to track when we started working and when to take a break. GTD methods like Pomodoro helps to track these moments but even with planned natural work blocks we miss taking a break from the screen.
I started to use a tool to remind break time with a schedule. First I used a paid app called Timeout.app. Then one of my colleagues found the open source alternative of the same tool. https://github.com/hovancik/stretchly
I’ve forked and modified the look and feel and some of the element’s positions for my own taste https://github.com/mfyz/stretchly
I highly suggest a timeout app like this one to be embedded in the workflow. Now I take much more regular breaks with the help of a tool like this. Sometimes I feel it becomes annoying because I feel I’m very focused. I don’t want to break the focus session but I also acknowledge the importance and the value of giving opportunity and space to our minds with these breaks.
The app is pretty straight forward to use. You set micro and regular breaks with an interval. I take 10 seconds micro break in every 10 minutes. Every after 2 micro breaks, I take a regular break of 5 minutes (every 30 minutes)