Whether in the office or at home – if you spend up to eight hours in front of a screen, you urgently need regular breaks and exercise. But you know it for sure: You are in the flow, you have to go to the next meeting right away and when you look at the clock you notice that you spent the last three hours without getting up. And your water glass has been empty for hours. Suboptimal.
A small open source tool called Stretchly can help you take better care of yourself. Thanks to Electron, the software is available for macOS, Windows and Linux and is inconspicuously linked to the background of your everyday computer life. There she runs timers that remind you to get up every now and then, get a glass of water or – as the name suggests – to stretch a little.
Pause options from Stretchly
In the basic setting, Stretchly lets you pause every five minutes for ten seconds and every 30 minutes for five minutes. In the options, however, you have extensive possibilities to adapt the intervals in length and regularity to your preferences – of course you shouldn’t just cheat yourself.
You have the choice of whether your break reminder should only be displayed as a normal notification. Alternatively, Stretchly puts them on your screen (or screens, if you are using more than one) in full screen so that you don’t miss them – intentionally or unintentionally. If you have chosen the full-screen version, you can have a notification displayed a few seconds in advance so that you can save documents and otherwise prepare for the break. If the time is really bad for a break, you can put it back a few minutes. If you stick to Stretchly’s rules, you have to catch up on them at some point.
If, on the other hand, it is a good time to take a break, you can also bring pauses forward and reset the timer. In the same way, you can simply pause Stretchlys Timer – for example if you are about to disappear into a longer lunch break anyway.
Exercise and relaxation tips
During your breaks, Stretchly provides you with a few short tips on ergonomics or provides you with small instructions for relaxation and stretching exercises. Or it just reminds you to get another glass of water. So that everything is easy to read, you have an extensive language selection in the options. If you need more tips on how to spend your breaks creatively, take a look at our office gadgets .
The tool from the area of wellness and relaxation, Stretchly also has features for look & feel on board. Among other things, you can set the color scheme of your break screens and choose which sound notification you want to hear as soon as it is your turn to take a break.