Remind yourself to take breaks at work with this free Mac app

We’ve all been there: working for hours at a stretch without taking a break, and finding ourselves with hungry stomachs and stiff necks.

If you forget to take small breaks regularly, there’s now an app for that. Developer Harshil Shah has made a simple menu bar app called Pause for Mac to remind you to step away from your desk regularly throughout the day.

The idea is neat and straightforward. Once you install the app, it’ll ask you to set times for how frequently you want to take breaks and how long they should last.

By default, it follows the 20-20 rule to remind you to stop working for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. But you can easily tweak that. You can also add custom reminders so you’ll remember to have a drink of water, or get up and stretch.

If you’re getting into a meeting and don’t want to receive these notifications, you can simply turn on turn on the Focus Mode, which puts Pause on hold until you want it back on.

There are plenty of apps out there to help you remember to take breaks, but they’re mostly designed to handle multiple reminders and to let you customize several parameters.

Pause is free to download and use for anyone running macOS Big Sur or newer. You can check it out here.