Tips to Drink More Water (and earn nerd points)

Drinking water is good for you. However, this post isn't about trying to convince you of that. Instead let's assume, like me, you want to drink more water but find it difficult to consume eight 8-ounce glasses per day.

To help me drink more water I need a glass of water at my desk and a reminder to actually drink it. The reminder is a crucial part because I have had a bottle of water sitting at my desk for weeks and barely touch it. The problem is I tend to get engrossed in what I'm doing and forget to drink.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. All I need is a system that forces me to stop what I'm doing and reminds me to drink a glass of a water periodically. If you use Ubuntu or another Gnome distribution (I'm sure this can be adapted to work on any OS) you can set this up in a few easy steps with Gnome's session manager, the AT command, and a bash script.

1. Create drink.sh in your home directory (anywhere is fine but you'll need to adjust the instructions accordingly) and copy and paste the following code into it:
   

   
   #!/bin/sh
   
   if [ "$1" = "schedule" ]
   then
       at 9:00am < $0
       at 10:00am < $0
       at 11:00am < $0
       at 12:00pm < $0
       at 1:00pm < $0
       at 2:00pm < $0
       at 3:00pm < $0
       at 4:00pm < $0
       at 5:00pm < $0
       echo "Drink reminders have been scheduled."
   else
       /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command -l
   fi

   
   Don't forget to give this file executable permissions. One way to do this is to right-click on the file, select Properties, select Permissions and then check the "Execute" checkbox.


2. To verify this works, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), navigate to your home directory, and type ./drink.sh (WARNING: This will cause Gnome to lock you out of your current session and you will have to unlock it with your password). If this worked, go back to your terminal and type ./drink.sh schedule. You should see several lines of output and a final line, "Drink reminders have been scheduled." If you don't see this, stop and investigate.


3. Now that this is working, you just need to tell Gnome to run the drink scheduler upon logging in. To do this, go to System > Preferences > Sessions and click "Add" under the "Startup Programs" tab. Enter whatever you like for the Name and Description, just make sure the Command points to your drink.sh file and passes the "schedule" argument (e.g. /home/username/drink.sh schedule).

And that's all there is to it. Next time you log in to your computer the drink scheduler will run and tell your computer to lock your screen every hour from 9:00am to 5:00pm. If you want to be reminded to drink at different times, just adjust drink.sh accordingly (should be fairly obvious what to do). As an added hint that it is time to drink, I set my screensaver to Ripples.

Here's to better health!

P.S. I initially tried to set this up with CRON but ran into limitations getting CRON to work with Gnome, as best summarized in this thread. If you know how to achieve similar results with CRON, please let me know.