Many among us that sit down at a desk all day long understand the significance of getting frequent breaks in order to stretch out muscles as well as refresh tired eyes. However while you are knee-deep in work, you can easily forget to take some time for your own benefit.

Workrave offers users an easy way to set break reminders. Its interface could use a little work in the design department, however it gets the job done. Workrave really is not much to look at. A box appears on your desktop. It has three break options – Micro-break, Rest break, Daily Limit – each represented by a vague icon. To configure each break, you have to right-click on the system-tray icon. From there, the Preferences menu lets you enable/disable each timer, modify the time between breaks, and set the break durations.

You also have the choice of displaying the Postpone and Skip buttons when the timers go off. There is a User Interface option for choosing sounds, and an always-on-top option that keeps the program on top of whatever you are working on at the moment. When the appropriate timer expires, a box will flash around on your screen and a sound will let you know that it is time to have a break. As an extra, Workrave includes a series of exercises that you can scroll through to get the most out of your break time.  Workrave does not have a help feature, but one isn’t really needed as it’s quite easy to use.

Check it out at Workrave.org/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011 at 11:38 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.