One of my more subtle ways in which I intend to beat the machine is by having regular tiny breaks from my sedentary 9-5 coding lifestyle.

I regularly sit in my chair continuously until lunch, often even through lunch. I’ve always known you should take breaks and have a stretch, but apparently not doing so is even worse than I thought.

Problem is, if I keep my eye on the clock and do a few stretches every thirty minutes, that great new habit is going to last, oh, all of thirty minutes. I can’t be thinking about that at the same time as focusing on work.

The other problem is that I might be at a loss as to what to do. “Okay, stretch. Take a break. Right. Should I do a lap around the office? Stretch my arms? Ummm…” Cue ten minutes passing. If I have to think about what I’m going to do, it’ll take me too much out of what I’m working on. I just don’t have the mental clarity for that kind of thing right now.

I looked through a bunch of pieces of freeware, shareware (and unsurprisingly, malware) proclaiming to remind you to stretch at set intervals, but none of them could convince me that they’d actually work.

I was about to call the whole thing off when finally I found something that didn’t suck, and that thing is called Big Stretch Reminder coded by a web developer by the name of Matt Lester. No spyware, and it’s free! Hooray for Matt! I will totally give you money once I’ve paid off my debt!

What makes BSR cool is that it avoids being bloatware (only 300kb, most of the other were 13mb or more) by being streamlined and straightforward. You can decide how often it bugs you (I’ve set it to thirty minutes) and you can get it to give you either a subtle reminder, or an in-your-face reminder that locks your computer down for the number of minutes you specify (I chose two minutes). You can skip a lockdown if it is inconvenient at that moment, but because it’s so much more difficult to ignore it’s been working much better for me.

The best bit is, you can get it to display a randomly-selected message from an XML file in the program’s installation folder every time it locks your computer. You can edit the XML file in something like Notepad for all kinds of goodness.

Matt populated the XML file largely with facts about RSI, but I have replaced all his facts with challenges for me to do within the two minute lockdown. I’ve written about 30 or so, and each have a different set of stretches, or 2-minute long activity for me to do to get my body moving.

And it’s awesome. I’ve been feeling more alert and focused. My muscles aren’t aching after spending 4+ hours without moving. And I don’t have to think, just do what the screen tells me to do. Woo! That’s my kind of mindless existence!