Productive Interrupt Tutorial – Revised

Here at Conversatio Morum I want to give you valuable and thought-provoking content.

Why? Because I love you.

So a while back I posted about efficiency being part of our mission and then a tutorial about how to create a productive interrupt on your computer. You can read those here and here. The tutorial was created with Windows 7 and when I switched to Windows 8 I discovered that there are some differences to how to set this up. So I want to show you those differences to make this information still be useful to you. I’ve also adjusted the frequency so I have two pop ups, one that runs on the hour, and one that runs on the half hour. The half hour post only asks if I’m stuck. The hourly popup asks if I’m stuck, tells me to check email, and tells me to get up and walk around.

Windows 8

  1.  Go to Documents Library and create a folder entitled Popup Messages
  2. Create a file with a relevant name (mine is hourly) and a .bat extension (may need to unhide file extensions for this (if you need help with unhiding those comment below).
  3. type in the following@echo off
    msg * “message displayed in popup
  4. save file
  5. Go to the far right of desktop till options appear
  6. Select Settings
  7. Select Control Panel from Settings
  8. In Control Panel select Schedule Tasks
  9. Select Create Task
  10. Give the task a relevant name and description
  11. Go to the triggers tab and select a new trigger (i.e. when you want the popup to start and recur
  12. Go to Actions and select new
  13. Select Action “Start a program and browse to select the .bat file you created
  14. Select OK and let the message pop-up on your preferred schedule.
  15. Enjoy your increase in productivity!!

———————————-Previous Post from Nov 1, 2012 ———————————

Windows 7

The image is a pop-up that my windows laptop gives me everyday on the hour.  It’s interruptive to my work, and that’s by design. It forces me to stop for a second and think about what I’m doing, decide if I need help or need to change what I’m working on at the moment.  OK, so here’s how you can set up something similar:

  1. First, open your start menu\control panel\administrative tools\task scheduler
  2. Choose “Create Task” from the right column of the wind
  3. Insert the Name of the pop-up, location is \, and description is the message you want in the pop-up

4. Select “Triggers” tab, edit trigger, adjust task schedule, select ok

5. Select “Actions” tab, edit action, select display a message, add title for name of pop-up, and add to message a matching description to be displayed.

6. Select OK and let the message pop-up on your preferred schedule.

7. Enjoy your increase in productivity!!