Don't Sit and Die. Use Workrave.

Several posts ago, I talked about how sitting for prolonged stretches can be the death of us desktop warriors. I forgot to mention that hitting at them keyboards for long stretches of time can--and often, will--lead to carpal tunnel syndrome. Now that isn't something you want to happen to you if your livelihood depended on your hands, believe me!

There's one free tool that I stumbled on a few weeks past that's designed to prevent (1) repetitive strain injury, and (2) croaking over your desk because you've been sitting an hour too long. It helps you take micro-breaks and longer rest breaks…and it tells you when your eight-hour workday (or your daily work limit) has ended.

Let me introduce to you…dun dun dun dun (drum roll)…Workrave.

It's a nifty tool for your Mac or PC and you can get it for free. (Praise God for good souls like the developers of Workrave.)

Workrave, like I said, has two kinds of breaks: the micro-break and the rest break.

Like how its name implies, micro-break is a short rest while the rest break is the longer stop. My micro-break lasts for 30 seconds and comes around every 30 minutes. (I use it to regroup, heh.) A pop-up appears just before a micro-break is due; in my machine, I've set it to warn me three times. And here's what's amazing about it: it doesn't let you ignore it.

The first time I tried to right click on the little pop-up in the middle of my screen because it was getting in the way of my video, it jumped to the top. When I chased it there, it slid to the bottom. You can only skip or postpone it when the main alert box appears.

When the longer rest breaks come--I've set mine to a 5-minute break every 1 hour--a dialogue box will open. What's fun about it is that it contains exercises you can do to get you standing up and moving about during the break. The exercises include ones for the hands and fingers, neck, eyes, and body.

Workrave is highly configurable--you can dictate how long you'll be working in front of your computer and your desk, how often the breaks will come, and how long they'll be. It's such a useful little helper that I don't know how I've lived without it.