I decided to try this out myself and set an alarm to go off every 15minutes on my phone triggering me to do something...anything at all.

This is what I have so far:

Time	Activity	Footsteps	Time Taken
5.20pm	made cup of tea, wiped kitchen surfaces, washed hands.	85	8mins
5.41pm	toilet, walked around flat, downstairs, picked up letters, up stairs.	79	3mins
6.03pm	put washed pots away	105	2mins
6.23pm	tidied bathroom	55	3mins
7.28pm	made tea, ate tea, watched tv, got drink	100	65mins
7.43pm	cleaned bathroom	54	7mins
8.12pm	emptied pots from kitchen sink, spoke to flatmate	35	14mins
8.47pm	washed pots, cleaned surface, toilet	96	20mins

So to summarise that:

In 3hours and 27 minutes

I have completed several hours of research, created a research blog, posted 6 new posts, received a job offer for next summer, had one cup of tea, cooked tea, watched one hour of television and cleaned my entire kitchen and bathroom.

Walked approximately 69 steps, burned a few calories no doubt and spent 122 minutes doing stuff that’s not work, that’s 2 hours and 2 minutes, meaning that my work only took me 1 hour and 5 minutes. Not bad.

I really think this works very well, the 15 minute intervals are a little annoying and a few times I overlapped to finish the last bit of a blog post or typing up a paragraph but generally, having a break every 15-20minutes seems to work well. You get a good balance between the kind of activities you complete, stuff you’ve been meaning to do and would usually put off gets done because you’ve got to do SOMETHING. And on returning to my laptop I seemed to re-evaluate what I was doing, helping me to stay on track and off facebook, which is a first. I really feel like I’ve accomplished a lot in the past 3 and a half hours, giving me the rest of the night to spend however I like, hopefully the breaks will work as well when I’m just chilling out, although I don’t know how much cleaning there can be left to do.

I think in the workplace however, 30 minute intervals may be more appropriate, depending on how long single tasks take and how possible it is to take a break from that task, although perhaps, as in my case it would help the worker to re-focus? Also, workers would have to work on a different timescale as you cant have everyone rushing for a cup of tea at 10.45 and no one at their desks.

I also think it would be really useful to create a list of activities in the breaks to complete, and perhaps allow the user to create a kind of “to do” list at the start of their day to complete in the breaks.

Other aspects could also be monitored such as heart rate and calories burned, monitored by the band.

Charlotte