Mindfulness bell in three easy steps

Breathing in and out three times is enough to release the tension in the body and smile, and then continue your work. If we’re in the middle of a conversation, hearing the bell of mindfulness can be a helpful reminder to practice mindful, compassionate speech. Source.

At the Plum Village, they have a mindfulness bell ringing every 15 minutes as a reminder to re-center yourself and stay present. I wanted something like this for my work computer since it's so easy to get carried away at work. There are many apps that do this: some of them are free, others are paid. Some are available as browser extensions, others are only available through the Mac App Store.

I don't like installing new stuff unless I have to. I like to figure out whether I can solve my immediate problem without adding anything new. Plus, I wanted the bell to ring at the 50-minute mark which wasn't supported by a few of those apps. Fortunately, on a Mac or a Linux machine doing it yourself is pretty easy:

1. Download the bell MP3 file from the Plum Village website.
2. Open your crontab editor: crontab -e
3. Add the following entry: 50 * * * * afplay /path/to/bell.mp3

And there you have it–enjoy!