Break Reminder — Stand Up, Water & Eye Break Notifications

What is the Break Reminder?

A recurring notification tool for the things that are easy to forget while you are concentrating: standing up, drinking water, resting your eyes, and fixing your posture. You define the schedule — every N minutes inside a window, or at specific times of day — pick the days it applies to, and the tool delivers a system notification on that device.

It is built for people who sit at a computer all day. Long uninterrupted sitting is the specific problem it targets, which is why the default preset nudges you every 45 minutes between 9am and 6pm on weekdays rather than on a fixed number of alerts per day.

The schedule engine runs in your browser, and reminder names, wording, rules, timezone, and history stay on your device. An optional wake-up relay can receive a random push token and future timestamps so the browser can be woken after it closes; it never receives the reminder content or what the schedule means.

How to Use the Break Reminder

1. Allow notifications — click Allow notifications. This also turns on sound for the tab, which browsers only permit after a click.
2. Add a reminder — pick a preset (Stand Up, Hydrate, 20-20-20 Eye Break, Posture Check, Pomodoro Break) or start from Custom.
3. Set the schedule — choose Every N minutes with an active window, or At set times for one or two fixed times a day. Then pick the days.
4. Pick a sound — each cue matches its purpose (birdsong to get moving, a gulp for water, a rising alert for posture). Preview them and choose the one you will actually notice, then set a snooze length.
5. Choose background delivery — leave the tab open for fully local reminders, turn on Cloud wake-ups for reminders after the browser closes, or export to calendar so your calendar app handles them.

Use Cases

• Desk workers — break up long sitting stretches with a short walk every 45 minutes.
• Hydration — an hourly nudge to drink water, active only during your working hours.
• Screen fatigue — the 20-20-20 rule, automated, so you do not have to watch the clock.
• Posture — a periodic check that your shoulders are back and your screen is at eye level.
• Focus work — a Pomodoro-style break signal at the end of each 25-minute block.
• Medication and stretching — fixed-time reminders on chosen days, twice a day if needed.
• Standing desk users — a cue to switch between sitting and standing at a regular cadence.

Why Use This Break Reminder?

No install and no account. Most reminder apps want a download, a sign-up, or a subscription. This is a web page you can bookmark.

Several reminders at once. Rather than a single timer, you can run stand-up, hydration, and eye-break schedules side by side, each with independent settings.

Real recurrence, not just a countdown. Active-hours windows, day-of-week selection, quiet hours, and clock alignment mean the reminder fits an actual working day. A schedule set for 09:00 stays at 09:00 across daylight saving changes.

Private by design. No account and no analytics on reminder content. The optional relay stores only a random device token and bare timestamps; reminder text, rules, timezone, and history stay local.

A calendar escape hatch. The .ics export turns your schedule into ordinary calendar events with alarms, which your phone and laptop will honour forever — no browser required.

Getting Reminders to Actually Reach You

Browsers deliberately restrict what a web page can do in the background, so it is worth knowing how the delivery works.

While the tab is open — even in the background behind other tabs — reminders fire reliably. The schedule is stored as absolute timestamps rather than as a running countdown, so a tab that a browser throttles or suspends will catch up the moment it wakes rather than silently drifting out of sync.

If you close the tab, fully local delivery stops because a static web page cannot schedule an operating-system alarm. There are two opt-in alternatives. Cloud wake-ups ask the ASAPUtils relay to send payload-free pings at timestamps your browser calculated; the service worker then reads the private reminder content from this device. The relay horizon covers the next seven days and refreshes when you revisit the page or edit a schedule. Or export the .ics file once and let Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar deliver native reminders with no relay involved.

For the best of both, keep the tab pinned on your work machine for custom sound cues and use either Cloud wake-ups or calendar export for times when the browser is closed.