I’m paranoid about RSI, so I use Workrave during the workday to remind me to take breaks away from the computer keyboard. I’ve configured it for a 30-second break every 7 minutes, and a 7-minute break every 53 minutes. Everyone has to choose what’s right for them; these values work for me.
One interesting thing about this program is that it keeps track of your keyboarding and mousing activity; you can see these statistics in some of the UI controls. I wrote a script to extract the historial statistics and graph the number of keystrokes over time, just to see how “productive” (as measured by keystrokes) I’ve been over the past two years:
workrave-dump extracts the statistics from the workrave historical statistics file. Run it like so:
% workrave-dump > workrave.out
gnuplot-workrave reads in the workrave.out file generated above (the filename is fixed) and generates a PNG graph like the one shown above. Run it like so:
% gnuplot-workrave
These scripts are distributed with the Workrave source as contrib/plot.
Other Unofficial Workrave Scripts and Links
- Gary Benson at inauspicious.org has a Python-based workrave stats-dumper: wrstats.py.
- Barry Irwin at lair.moria.org has graphed his own workrave activity: Workrave Statistics.
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