Survival tips: the 20-20-20 rule

This week has been a bad week and it’s also my mother’s birthday but all of that is too much to think about right now.

Instead I’m just going to share a quick easy thing because I was reminded of it by a friend’s Substack (everyone I know has a Substack!)

The 20-20-20 rule is simply:

Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

Everyone who spends their day in front of a screen should do this, concussion or not. It’s good for your eyes, it’s good for your head.

I was reminded of it because my friend wrote about setting reminders to move and ignoring them (I, too, have so many reminders on my phone that I ignore!) but the work-from-home hack for this is simple:

Set the oven timer.

That’s it. The timer is in another room. The timer is part of a giant unmoveable appliance. You have to get up to turn it off. That’s the hack.

Because it’s a 20-second break, you don’t have to worry about appearing away on Teams, or losing track of what you are doing. The other day, I had just hit CTRL+C in a document, took my 20-second break to turn off the oven timer (and reset it for another 20 minutes), and came back to CTRL-V whatever it was in the document I was working on. Pretty much seamless. But your eyes and brain (and body) will appreciate the tiny time away.