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When should you stay home sick because you are contagious?
If you’re an average worker, you take a few minutes every hour to accomplish something besides what you’re paid to do. This was true as far back as 1940, workers were slipping away for three precious personal minutes an hour. The latest estimate, with the Internet era in full effect, is closer to seven minutes and change. Taking 10 percent of the paid day for your own pleasure might seem like a gross violation of employer trust. But pacing yourself is key in a connected age that extends the work day far beyond the proverbial punch card, and brings greater risk of burnout. So the key question isn’t really whether or not breaks are a good idea, but what types of breaks do the best job restoring an employee’s capacity to handle the tasks ahead.
Twenty-one tiny tasks seemed to improve wellbeing. Virginia Commonwealth University doctoral candidate Andrew Bennett reached a similar conclusion in a 2015 dissertation. Using an experimental approach, Bennett simulated work fatigue in a lab, then gave test participants a one-, five-, or nineminute break that involved watching a funny video, watching a meditation video, or doing a new task. Across the board, with few exceptions, he found that the minute-long break offered comparable benefits to the longer breaks in terms of reducing fatigue, increasing vigor, or sharpening attention.
1. The Earlier The Break, The Better
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Many of our cognitive resources diminish as the day goes on. On one hand, that might seem like a reason to do as 5-Hour Energy suggests and take a late break to avoid That 2:30 Feeling. On the other hand, if there is a steady decline in our abilities, it could make sense to break early and stay near the top of the performance chart as long as possible. To test that question (among several others), management scholars Emily Hunter and Cindy Wu of Baylor University recently asked 95 employees to record their break activity every day for a work week. They also collected data on levels of concentration, physical and emotional fatigue, and job satisfaction. Their results show pretty clearly that breaks taken earlier in the shift led to better outcomes than those taken later. The findings align with previous conceptual work arguing for the "front-loading of rest breaks" over a schedule that spaced out breaks evenly throughout the day. The general idea is that breaking early keeps your faculties near the high settings they had when the day began, so by the time the work day is done, they won’t have dipped so drastically.
3. What You Do Is Less Important Than What You Want To Do
The instinct during a break is to do anything but work. Sure enough, in his experiment, Bennett found that people who detached from work during their break by watching a funny video reported less fatigue, higher vigor, and increased attention. But zoning out isn’t the only refreshing break option. Bennett found that, for some people, doing another work-related task has its own benefits, namely, increased attention and reduced fatigue. A 2011 study of 214 professional and clerical workers found that eight common work-related tasks gave them a boost of post-break vitality without making them more tired. These tasks tended to fall under the categories of learning something work-related, reflecting on job performance or meaning, or improving relationships with colleagues, in other works, taking a bit of down time to get better at the job they do the rest of the time. What both types of breaks share is that they give the person some enjoyment. 4. Walks Can Boost Creativity
If you’re looking for tips on what to do during a break, you could do a lot worse than a walk 2. Short Breaks Can Be Just As Powerful around the block or pacing around the office, especially if your job requires a good deal of As Long Ones A natural worry with an early break schedule is creativity. that it will prevent you from getting into a work In one recent experiment, part of a larger study groove. But breaks need not be long to be effecon the creative impact of walking, researchers tive. The past two years have produced research gathered 40 test participants and put them in four on the undersized might of micro-breaks, typically different situations. Some sat inside, some walked defined as a break that’s less than 10 minutes. In on a treadmill inside, some sat outside, and some fact, even 60 seconds away from a task can do walked outside. Afterwards, the participants generthe trick. ated analogies for a series of prompts. Whether A survey of 124 full-time office workers found that outdoor or indoor, the people who had walked micro-breaks reduced self-reported fatigue and around came up with responses judged as being increased vitality over the course of a work day. higher quality or especially novel.
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5. And Nature Walks Can Boost Attention
While you’re up and about on break, take a stroll through a nearby park if possible. It will do wonders for your attention. The restorative power of nature on the tired mind is one of the strongest findings in modern psychology. Time and again, test participants who walked through a tree-filled landscape performed better on cognitive attention tasks than others who took a walk through a common city environment. If you can’t get out of the office, find yourself some trees on the street or a neighboring roof. Writing in the Journal of Environmental Psychology earlier this year, Australia-based researchers report that a 40-second glimpse of an image of a flowering green roof gave test participants a boost on an attention task, compared with participants who looked at a picture of a plain old concrete roof. 6. Don’t Get Pressured Into Lunch Plans
Lunch is the longest break of the day, but that doesn’t automatically make it the most refreshing one. What matters most, according to one new study, is whether or not you decide for yourself how to spend that time. For the study, 100 workers completed questionnaires about their lunch breaks for 10 straight work days. These participants reported what they did for lunch (did they socialize, relax, or even work a little?), how much autonomy they had over the break, and how tired they felt at the end of the day. Generally speaking, the researchers found that as autonomy increased, fatigue declined. For employees who spent their lunch socializing or working, that outcome makes sense: If you spend all of lunch chatting or doing tasks you didn’t pick for yourself, it might be just as tiring as regular work. The lesson here is that workers who got to choose how they spent lunch found themselves more energized afterward. 7. The Perfect Nap Is 10 To 20 Minutes
Should you be lucky enough to have a rest area in your office you might be tempted to catch some shuteye during a break. But make sure you get the timing right: Snooze too long, and you’ll be even more tired than before. A 2006 study in the journal Sleep found 10 minutes to be the ideal nap length. Ten minutes led to immediate improvements in fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance lasting more than two hours. Research found a 20-minute nap to be productive, too, once you got past a groggy period of a half hour or so. Source: Fast Company