Workrave - avoid Repetitive Strain Injuries

Filed under: Business, Developer, Windows, Linux, Office, Productivity, Open Source

Workrave - avoid Repetitive Strain Injuries

by Jason Clarke Jan 16th 2007

Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker pointed out an open-source application called Workrave today, and it's a good one. For those of us that spend what seems like every waking hour in front of our computers, we're definitely at risk of acquiring a repetitive stress injury. More than once I've found myself wearing a wrist brace when the most strenuous thing I could attribute it to would be typing or mousing, so I know these risks first-hand.

Workrave is a little timer application that keeps track of how long you've been working, and prompts you to take micro-breaks , rest breaks, and enforces a daily computer limit. All of these things have been done by other applications, but Workrave also includes recommended exercises that show during rest breaks, complete with illustrations to get you going in the right direction.

Another very cool feature is the fact that users that regularly work on multiple computers can run Workrave on all of those machines, and synchronize them; this means that they get their break warnings no matter where they happen to be computing. Back when I was doing software testing, this would have been a life saver!

While the evidence that breaks are necessary to maintain good health when heavily computing, I'm still not sure how I feel about all these micro-breaks, which just start feeling like micro-interruptions. That being said, I should really give this a try, considering the wrist trouble I've previously had.

Tags: breaks, micro breaks, MicroBreaks, repetetive stress, repetetive stress injury, RepetetiveStress, RepetetiveStressInjury, rest breaks, RestBreaks, RSI, work breaks, WorkBreaks, Workrave

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

JodieM said 5:06PM on 1-16-2007

Having used this excellent tool for about 6 months now I can highly recommend it (I also suffer from RSI when working too hard). However here are the settings I would recommend to make it not so annoying after the first few times it pops up.
I have Micro Breaks at 20 minutes and Rest Breaks at 1 Hour, and no daily limits, it works well for me.
Check Show Postpone and Skip Buttons and Suspend Timer when inactive.
I like the Prompt before breaking and maximum of 2 prompts.
After about 3 months of seing the same excercises pop up, I've now asked it to show 0 excercises on the Rest Break.
Now the biggest tip of all, Under User Interace select No Sounds. That was the biggest annoyance for me after a while.
I also have Block Input as the setting, not Block Input and Screen as I think that's just a bit too extreme.
Before turning off the sounds I was getting really annoyed with it, but now it works really well for me.
I hope this helps you too.

Mike said 6:23PM on 1-16-2007

I've been wanting to get something like this for quite some time, and it seems to hit on all the features I want, and then some. I'll take into account the recommended settings above, and hopefully this helps me have better computing habits :)

Dick Boogaers said 6:04AM on 1-17-2007

Workrave has a feature that was not exposed in this blog: dynamic micro breaks. That means, that when you have a natural micro break (getting some coffe, or whatever) the timer for the next microbreak starts anew when you resume your computerwork. I see very few microbreaks during the day, because of that.
And if you are away long enough, it will also reset the rest break timer.

spacey said 6:06AM on 1-20-2007

I've been a workrave user for more than 1 year. It's great, especially for those who spend 6-8 hours or more every day on the computer.

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