How often should you get up from your desk?
For anyone who sits down at nine and looks up at one.
The number you will see most often is every 30 to 60 minutes. It is a reasonable place to start. It is also repeated with far more confidence than it deserves, and it is worth knowing which parts of it are settled and which parts are somebody’s round number.
The short version
If you want a rule and not an essay: stand up and move for a minute or two every 30 to 60 minutes, and care more about never sitting for three hours straight than about hitting the interval exactly.
That is the honest summary. The rest of this page is why the second half of that sentence matters more than the first.
Where the numbers come from
Three conventions circulate, and they do not agree with each other.
Every 30 minutes. The most-quoted figure in office-ergonomics writing. It is short enough to break up a long focus block and long enough not to be absurd.
Every hour. What Apple’s Watch settled on for its stand reminders, and what most people’s mental model of “getting up regularly” looks like.
The 20-8-2 rule. Twenty minutes sitting, eight standing, two moving, on a loop. It comes out of the sit-stand desk world and assumes you have a desk that goes up and down.
Notice that these span a factor of three. That is not a sign that two of them are wrong; it is a sign that there is no single correct interval, and the people writing the guidance are picking a number that is easy to remember rather than one that fell out of a measurement.
Anyone who tells you the answer is precisely 27 minutes is selling something.
What seems to matter more than the interval
The thread running through nearly all of the advice is not really about frequency. It is about two other things:
Total time in the chair. Eight hours of sitting broken into eight one-hour blocks is still eight hours of sitting. Interrupting it is good; interrupting it does not convert it into something else.
The length of your longest unbroken stretch. This is the one most people under-rate. A day with a single three-hour block in it is a different day from one where the longest stretch was fifty minutes, even if the totals match. If you only have the attention for one thing, make it this: notice the three-hour stretches and break them.
And a third, which is obvious but keeps getting left out of the listicles: what you do when you get up. Ninety seconds of walking to the kitchen and back is a different event from standing next to your chair reading your phone. Not because one is virtuous, but because one involves moving and the other is sitting while vertical.
Why the exact number is the wrong thing to optimise
Here is the practical argument, and it is the one this whole site is built on.
The difference between getting up every 30 minutes and every 45 minutes is small. The difference between getting up every 45 minutes and getting up never, because you stopped paying attention to the reminder in week two, is enormous.
So the question worth asking is not “what is the optimal interval” but “what is the interval I will still be following in a month”. Those have different answers, and the second one is the one that changes your day.
In practice that means picking something on the longer end of what you have read, and then leaving it alone. An hour that you keep beats half an hour that you abandon.
How to pick yours
A short version that does not require a spreadsheet:
- Start at 60 minutes. It is the least annoying of the common intervals and the easiest to defend to yourself at 3pm.
- Run it for a week and count how often you ignored it. If you are dismissing it most times it appears, the interval is not your problem — the reminder is arriving during things it cannot be obeyed during.
- If you never ignore it, try 45. If you ignore it constantly, go to 90 and get something that actually works rather than something that is theoretically better and functionally off.
- Separately, watch your longest stretch. Meetings and deep-focus blocks are where the three-hour sits hide, and they are the ones worth targeting specifically.
The part nobody’s rule accounts for
Every interval above assumes you did not get up on your own. Most people do get up — for coffee, for the bathroom, to answer the door, to find a charger. A plain timer cannot tell. It counts from the last time it buzzed, so it buzzes again whether you spent the last hour in the chair or spent fifteen minutes of it walking around the building.
That is the reason so many break reminders get switched off: the app is wrong, visibly and repeatedly, in a way the user can see and it cannot. Being told to stand up ninety seconds after you sat back down from a walk is the moment a reminder app stops being useful and starts being noise.
It is also solvable, because a phone already records whether you walked.
What Office Shrimp does with this
Office Shrimp reads your iPhone’s motion sensor and, if you wear one, your Apple Watch’s step count through Apple Health. Getting up and walking resets the clock. So the interval you set is not “buzz me every hour” — it is “tell me when I have been sitting for an hour”, which is a different and much less annoying statement.
On a day where you were up and about anyway, it says almost nothing. On a day you never left the chair, it asks repeatedly. The volume follows what you actually did, which is the only way a reminder stays credible long enough to be worth having.
It is for iPhone, iOS 18 or later, and it is on the App Store.
One boundary, stated plainly. None of this is medical advice, and no app is. If you have back pain, neck pain, RSI or any symptom you are worried about, that is a question for a clinician and not for a reminder on your lock screen. Everything above is about the ordinary problem of forgetting to stand up.
