How to Set Hourly Reminders on Your Windows 8 PC

Have you ever had the need to setup hourly reminders to do certain tasks on a regular basis? Like for instance, setting up an hourly reminder to tell yourself to get out of your work cubicle and stretch your muscles, or set an alarm every few hours or so to check the status or progress of a task? There may be many such instances where you’ll want to be notified of stuff, and a smartphone app may sometimes just not fit the job. In such cases, you can turn to you trusted PC to help you out. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t really offer a clear cut solution to setting short recurring reminders but surprisingly Windows 8 does. Let’s see how you can setup hourly reminders on a Windows 8 PC.

Set Hourly Reminders Using Task Scheduler

The tool that we are going to use is called Task Scheduler. Its free, built into Windows 8 and easy to use.

1. To get to the Windows 8 Task Scheduler, first go to the Start screen and type Windows Task Scheduler.

 

2. Click Schedule tasks to open up the Task Scheduler dialog box.

3. In the Task Scheduler, in the Actions pane on the right, click Create Task.

 

4. In the Create Task dialog box, on the General tab, enter a Name for the task.

5. Then, click the Triggers tab and click New at the bottom of the Window.

 

6. In the New Trigger dialog box, in the Begin the task drop-down ensure that On a schedule is selected. This is to ensure that you get an alert on the scheduled time and day.

7. In the Settings section, select Weekly, if you only want the hourly reminder to work on specific days of the week. You can also choose one time, daily, or monthly options. If you’re choosing weekly, check the days of the week when you want to set the reminders for. In the Recur every week text box, ensure that 1 is displayed. This will ensure that the reminder runs every day of the week.

8. In the Start text boxes, select the date and time when the task should first start running. Click the calendar icon in the first text box and select a day. Then click the second box and set the time. you can also use the up and down arrows to set the time.

 

9. In the Advanced settings section, select the Repeat task every check box and select a time from the drop-down list. You can choose to set between 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 1 hour. You can even set a different time by typing inside the box. I’m going to set the alarm for every 1 hour. Now the task will alert you every hour for an entire day.

10. If you want the task to run only until the end of day, in the for a duration of text box, select a specific time or type in a time you see fit.

11. At the bottom of the New Trigger window, ensure that Enabled is checked.

12. Click OK.

The new trigger will now show up on the Triggers tab.

13. Select the Actions tab and click New at the bottom of the window.

14. In the New Action dialog box, from the Action drop-down, ensure that Start a program is selected.

Note that in Windows 8.1, the Display a message and Send an e-mail feature are deprecated. You’ll need to work around this issue to make it work.

15. Open notepad and write this down.

msgbox(“Take a Break!”)

You can of course add any message you like within quotes.

16. Save the notepad as msg.vbs. You do this by saving the notepad in the usual format and then changing the extension to .vbs.

17. In the New Action dialog box, click Browse, navigate to the location where you saved the msg.vbs file and select it.

 

18. Click OK to close the dialog box.

19. Now you’ll be back in the Task Scheduler window. You can now test the task.

20. In the left pane, click Task Scheduler Library. Then in the right pane, scroll down to your task, right-click it and select Run.

You should be able to see your message pop up now.

Although Microsoft has deprecated one of the most handy features in Task Scheduler, you have just got it to work for you.