Plan Your Breaks Easily with Python

Hello reader!

Working from home is the new normal. and It is a must to ensure a healthy work-life balance. You cannot just grab a laptop and keep working all day long, it will affect your health drastically.

Schedule your breaks, by far the way out. It works out well for me. In this blog post, we will learn how to build a break Scheduler. We will see the implementation in Python.

Check out the Repository for Ultimate Resource in python. Drop a star if you find it useful! Got anything to add? Open a PR on the same!

What will be covered in this Blog

1. Why breaks are important & how to Utilize them?
2. What is webbrowser Module
3. How to build a simple breaks Scheduler using Python.

Let's get started!

Why breaks are important & how to Utilize them?

Working from home can be a tiring desk job. You need to take care of your mental health. Well you can schedule your breaks to

• Take a small five-minute break every hour
• Drink water frequently.
• Stretch your muscles.
• Prepare Tea/Coffee or any healthy drink and take a small walk for few minutes.
• When you receive a non-work call, again do a little walk and talk.

How do you Utilize and plan your breaks?

Module Used: webbrowser Module:

The webbrowser module provides a high-level interface to allow displaying Web-based documents to users. Under most circumstances, simply calling the open() function from this module will do the right thing. The script webbrowser can be used as a command-line interface for the module. It accepts a URL as the argument.

If you wish to know more about it, you can refer to webbrowser Module Documentation.

Now that you are familiar with Why breaks are important & how to Utilize them? and have acquired basic knowledge of webbrowser module, we can move forward to the coding section.

Time to Code!

You can find all the code in my GitHub Repository. Drop a star if you find it useful.

In order to access the Python library, we need to import the package into our python script. Use the following command to do so.

import time 
import webbrowser

from random import choice

Now that we have imported the library using the command import requests, let's proceed.
Let's display a welcome message.

print("Initiating the Break Scheduler!")

Let's ask the user to input the number of breaks he wishes to take or since you are running the script for yourself, you can also hardcode the value.

breaks = input('input the number of times you wish to take break today! ')
print(breaks)

#breaks = 2

Now, you can set the break interval according to your need. I am setting the break interval as every hour for now.

gap = 60*60

Initially let's set the counter as zero

counter = 0

Now, let's define the URL, you wish to open in the interval

url = "https://www.youtube.com/c/AyushiRawat"

Let's make use of `random` module to display a random message at every break interval. Let's store the messages to be displayed in messages for the same.

messages = ["Time for a break!", "Let's take a break!"]

Our resultant data is stored in res. We will make use of the text method to extract our desired weather details and let's display the result.
Now, let's run a while loop until the counter becomes equal to the number of desired breaks.

while(counter < breaks):
    time.sleep(gap)

    #Let's print the break message
    print(choice(messages))

    #opening the browser window.
    webbrowser.open(url)

We will introduce sleep here to schedule the breaks. A random message will be displayed on the screen and the URL will open automatically at every interval.
At last, let's increase the counter by one.

counter += 1

And finally, let's display the termination message when the scripts end.

print("Terminating the Break Scheduler!")

That's it. That all we have to do to build a simple break scheduler. And with that, it's a wrap! I hope you found the article useful! Share in the comments below.

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Resources:

• docs.python.org/3/library/webbrowser.html

See you in my next Blog article, Take care!!