Sri Chinmoy, the inspiration behind Vasudeva Server, suggested once that having a small meditation every hour on the hour for three minutes could help you stay in an inspired frame of mind throughout the day. It is something I actually did many years ago when I was researching my PhD, when nobody really cared too much what you did with your time, but as the years progressed I somehow lost the habit. However working with computers means that sometimes you definitely need all the tools at your disposal in order to stay in an inspiring frame of mind 🙂
I thought about it again recently, and started searching around for some application for my Mac that would toll the hour, so I could break of from what I was doing and meditate. It didn’t take me long to find Cuckoo – it basically installs itself in your System Preference pane. For an extra $6 you can get all kinds of extra bells and whistles, but the free version has what I need, a ding dong sound to mark the hour. (Note: the ‘Campanile’ tone seems custom-made for hourly meditation. Maybe in some future version they’ll even put in some Tibetan bells or an Aum chant to further make my day. )