Nudges for your eyes, your posture and your water glass

Turn on the channels you want and pick an interval for each. The countdowns are anchored to stored timestamps rather than a ticking counter, so switching tabs will not drift them. When one comes due you get a chime, an optional browser notification, and a banner at the top of this page with two choices: done, which restarts the interval from now, or snooze, which pushes it 5 minutes out.

The eye break

When the eye reminder fires, a full-screen counter takes over for 20 seconds. Distance is the point of the exercise, so pick a window, a doorway, or anything across the room rather than the far edge of your desk. You can skip it, and you can run it on demand from the alerts card whenever your eyes feel tired.

What happens while you are away

If a reminder comes due while this tab is hidden, it is skipped rather than saved. When you come back, every armed channel starts a fresh interval from that moment. You will not return to four chimes queued up, and you will not be told to drink three glasses of water to catch up.

Picking intervals

The defaults are 20, 45 and 60 minutes. If you find yourself dismissing a channel without doing anything, lengthen it rather than leaving it as noise you have learned to ignore. A reminder you act on twice a day beats one you cancel twelve times.

The 20-20-20 rule is standard optometric advice for screen strain, and it is worth keeping in proportion. It is about comfort: dry, tired, aching eyes at the end of a screen day. The studies behind it measure symptom scores, not eye health, and there is no good evidence that looking away protects your vision. If it makes your afternoons less scratchy, that is the benefit on offer, and it is a real one.

Movement breaks have firmer support. Interrupting long sitting with brief walking breaks lowers post-meal blood glucose and insulin compared with sitting straight through, and the effect turns up with breaks of a couple of minutes taken every 30 to 60 minutes. The metabolic evidence is stronger than anything in the eye-strain literature, so if you keep only one channel on, keep this one.

Water is the weakest of the three. No fixed daily target holds for everyone, thirst works well for most healthy adults, and the eight-glasses figure has no real basis. The reminder still earns a place for a different reason: it gets you out of the chair, which is the part that is actually supported.