The Dutch are Europe’s champion sitters and we IT workers take the trophy. With an average of just over seven hours per day spent sitting, we’ve become exceptionally good at keeping our butts warm. Even after work. We all know it’s unhealthy, yet breaking a stubborn habit is, well, stubborn. Every time we sit down to log in, it gets a little worse. Sure, some of us are mindful. I often see sit-stand desks set to 'stand', slightly sweaty colleagues returning from an afternoon walk, and the boulderer rolling in with a gym bag. But it’s still nowhere near enough.

The Standard Solutions

This problem isn’t new, but it has worsened. Complaints from bad or prolonged computer use have existed as long as computers themselves. For me, it hit during the COVID pandemic, when working from home became the norm and I had just blown out 30 candles. After I bought a few ergonomic gadgets, my wrist and back pain eased, but my waistline didn’t. The fact that gyms were limiting access didn’t help either. As if that wasn’t enough, my eyes started to complain. They would get dry and often blurry at the end of a workday. It was then that I felt a real urgency to do something about it.

The solution is simple and we all know it: take breaks from our screens. Many tools that can help us with this are inspired by the Pomodoro technique, a now 45-year-old method designed to boost focus and productivity. You work in fixed-length intervals, take short breaks between them, and after four 'Pomodoros' you take a longer break. At that time my workstation was pre-installed with Wellnomics Workpace. Designed for ergonomics, it took the break concept a step further. At the end of each interval I was asked to do some eye and stretch exercises. Suddenly, a break wasn’t just time spent waiting to work again; I didn’t always need a coffee or a bathroom trip; but a varied and proactive moment.

Finding My Built-in Timer

Sadly, I quickly started ignoring the reminders. Not because I didn’t want to (who doesn’t feel the need to roll their eyes at something at some point), but because the reminders seemed to pop up at the worst possible moments. Over and over. A traditional Pomodoro is 25 minutes, but for me these alerts popped up so frequently that it felt like spam. Depending on the task, I started experimenting with work/break ratios: 45 minutes of deep focus for complex work, about an hour for lighter coding tasks. That helped a little, but creativity isn’t a timer. When hyperfocus kicks in, you don’t break it, you embrace it.

Gently falling back on old habits, I realized something: I didn’t really need a separate timer telling me to take a break. My work already did it for me. Every time my OS wanted to update, IntelliJ started indexing, or tests began running, I was waiting anyway. Recently it became clear when a new frustration was introduced: LLMs generating code. Instead of staring at the internal ‘deep thinking’ monologue or mindlessly scrolling through social media, I could use those moments to take a break. The ergo, wellness, and eye-fatigue apps try, but they lack the finesse of good timing. Why force a rigid schedule when my day is already full of natural pause points?

Building Active Micro-Workouts

The problem isn’t just ergonomics: it’s agility. Adjustable desks, ergonomic chairs, wrist supports… they’ve all done wonders for posture, backs, and wrists. But none of them really compensate the hours of sitting. Once you pass 30, you lose a little muscle mass every year. And to make it worse, bone density gradually declines making standing up, carrying things, or even getting up harder down the line. So why not use those waiting moments for something a little more physically challenging than a neck stretch? IDE indexing? Squat. Tests running? Push-up. LLM generating? Burpee.

The result of all this thinking? I decided to vibe-code a simple IntelliJ plugin. As my first-ever Kotlin project, it’s full of quirky code and a few ‘what was I thinking?’ moments. The event triggers are limited for now, so terminal and LLM-related nudges are still on the wishlist. The irony wasn’t lost on me when, while debugging a concurrency issue, the plugin itself unleashed a flood of pop-ups, all while I was glued to my chair. Maybe one day it will be refined into a tool that nags you at, for you, the right times without becoming annoying. If this project can eventually pull just one person somewhere in the world out of their chair, I’ll consider it a win. It’s a small ambition, but remember a saying you often hear for a reason:

Small actions, performed consistently, can make a big difference.

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