Taking a Break

01 August 2014

I'm self-employed and I work every day at home for my company, Pixelnest Studio.

A common good practice recommended by almost any home-worker is to take a quick (3 minutes) walking break every 45 minutes or so.

  1. It makes you move your body. Especially your legs and your back.
  2. It gets you out of your computer.
  3. It rests your eyes. Try to fix an object at 15m and blink your eyes a few times. It's a good way to not only use your close-sight during work.

It's a simple habit, but it's hard to get used to it. For the last weeks, I forced myself to walk for 3 minutes every 1 hour of work.

And… it's great. I'm really feeling much more concentrated and ready.

Because I will forget to stand up as soon as I'm working, I've made a little "app" for OSX. In fact, it's just a simple automator app that will trigger a notification for three minutes. Follow the gist above to know how to use it. It's dead simple, but it works.

NB: this advice is especially true for self-employed people (because you can't take a break with your coworkers), but anybody working at a desk for several hours should do it. It costs nothing, and your body will love it.