What Time is it Jeeves?

If you read my blog regularly, you know my main work at home job is as a transcriptionist, which means I download audio from an FTP site, transcribe it, then upload it back to the client. It's a great job, and I love it. But sometimes when I get into the zone, and I'm typing really fast, I can forget to stop and take a break.

That's when I start to have back and hand problems like the ones I'm having this week. I've downloaded several timers off the Internet. And while they were okay, I had to keep going back and manually resetting them to remind me to take a break every 30 minutes or so. So it got to be more trouble than it was worth. And as happens when something is more trouble than it's worth, eventually you just stop doing it.

But I just downloaded the free 30-day trial of Say the Time. It's an atomic clock software download for Windows. And it's great! It has a built-in pop-up calendar and fits down in your taskbar, so that you can always see, at a glance, the month, day, and current time.

You can also set it to speak the time out loud every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or more. I've set the volume on mine to low, so that every 30 minutes, I get a gentle reminder that a half-hour has passed, and it's time to get up stretch and walk around for a minute.

What's really neat, though, is you can set Say the Time to send you messages on certain dates at certain times, and you can write the message you want to see. If you have the text-to-speech engine on your computer, you can even have your pre-set message read aloud to you. I honestly don't know when I've seen a tool that was more well designed. Try it for yourself, and let me know what you think.