Recently I noticed that my eyes have been feeling strained after putting in lengthy spells of time in front of my computer. A little research gave me a simple tip to combat this, which is to take a break every 15 minutes to look around and focus on something else for half a minute (with some good blinking thrown in). But of course—the hard part is remembering to do this.

I looked at a few timer programs on the apple app store, but they had way too many features and didn’t do exactly what I wanted. So I settled on this:

alias eyes="while sleep 900; do say exercise your eyes; done"

Stick that in your .bashrc or .zshrc or what-have-you, and run ‘eyes’ in a console window. Ctrl-c to kill it.

At first I found that I didn’t want to take a break because I was focused on something. But now I use that break time to plan my next step or write the next line of code in my head, and it doesn’t really interrupt me.

Edit: MacOS Sierra has changed the available voices, so I just have the default now. It’s a little boring but it works.