Humans weren’t meant for sitting, and it has caused me a great deal of issues personally. I wanted to schedule reminders on Mac for standing up and drinking water, since I lose track of time pretty easily.

Turns out this is very simple to do.

  1. Create a shell script (for example, drink-water.sh):
1#!/bin/bash
2osascript -e 'display notification "You need water" with title "Drink water"'

  1. Make the script executable, then register it with launchd.

  2. If it doesn’t already exist, create ~/Library/LaunchAgents.

  3. Create ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.my.drink-water.plist:

 1<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 2<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
 3 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
 4<plist version="1.0">
 5<dict>
 6  <key>Label</key>
 7  <string>drink.water.reminder</string>
 8
 9  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
10  <array>
11    <string>/full/path/to/drink-water.sh</string>
12  </array>
13
14  <key>StartInterval</key>
15  <integer>1800</integer>
16
17  <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
18  <string>/tmp/water.err</string>
19  <key>StandardOutPath</key>
20  <string>/tmp/water.out</string>
21</dict>
22</plist>
  1. Load it:
1launchctl load /full/path/to/com.my.drink-water.plist