Force Yourself to Take Breaks By Locking Yourself Out of Your Computer and Changing the Keyboard Layout

Breaks are an important part of the day, and if you're too busy powering through work you'll eventually cause a bunch of unneeded stress. Blogger Simon Jackson was so bad at taking breaks he had to come up with an extreme solution. In this case, lock himself out of his computer, and change the keyboard layout.

You'll find plenty of less sadistic break reminders out there, like Awareness, Eyeleo or Coffee Break, but those are all incredibly easy to disable if you want to continue working. Jackson's method is a lot tougher:

1. Once activated, the script will launch the screensaver and simultaneously lock the computer.
2. Next, the script launches a little command line utility changeInput that swaps out your current keyboard layout to the Dvorak layout
3. At this point, if you try to simply type in your password normally it will fail.
4. Once the predetermined break time is up, changeInput will return your keyboard to its original layout

With Jackson's method, you can log back in if you really have to, but you need to know the Dvorak layout of a keyboard. Obviously, this is meant for only the most extreme who refuse to take breaks throughout the day, but if that sounds like you, it's worth a shot to form a better habit. After all, taking breaks is integral for staying motivated, sleeping better, and productivity. Find out how to implement this for yourself over on Jackson's site. His tutorial for setting this up only applies to Macs, but it should be possible to reproduce on Windows as well.

How I Force Myself to Take Breaks | miniArray via Hacker News

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/9z1JFGlv_q0/force-yourself-to-take-breaks-by-locking-yourself-out-of-your-computer-and-changing-the-keyboard-layout

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