Breaking Good

There was an article that appeared in mid March on the ‘A Life of Productivity’ BLOG that looked at ‘breaks’, we are all aware that in using IT equipment we are encouraged to have regular breaks from the equipment but this BLOG talked about engineering our breaks to follow the same pattern as our sleep, I’m not quite sure what the science of it is but I guess finding and utilising our bodies natural rhythms has got to be worth a try.  The BLOG called for breaks every 90 minutes because the general accepted period that we sleep in, is 90 minute cycles, each period alternating between light, deep and REM sleep.  There is it seems an argument that in the mornings at work our bodies alternate between 90 minute periods of wakefulness punctuated by 20-30 minute periods of sleepiness/tiredness ( my won experience is that I’m tired most of the afternoon after 2pm rather than in bursts in the morning ).  The advice seems to be to break every 90 minutes and take 10/20 minutes when we are naturally groggy.  This seems a bit simplistic to me and is obviously hard to achieve when you have colleagues booking meetings across your natural rhythms of the morning.

So we have a counterintuitive proposition that its better to take more breaks for better productivity.  This sort of implies that a break acts as downtime to refresh and recharge yourself, now there might be guilt associated with this but lets remember the end goal of our working isn’t so much about how much we do, but its about how much we achieve.

To play this into my mental health challenges that I have in the work place, I know that I am really tired in the afternoons so my takeaway is that in order to improve my productivity in the afternoons I will need to take more breaks and I’m hopeful that will improve my performance in the afternoon,  I will also look at the 90 minute period in  the earlier part of the day as best I can.  Apparently a way of doing this is to look at writings on the Pomodoro cycle which looks at the work/break make up of your working practices.  Another thing I am looking to achieve because of the fatigue I have in the afternoon is to work on tasks such that I don’t try to finish them without a break but I work on them whilst I feel productive, then break, then come back to them and by working on lower priority work in the afternoons I should still maintain performance at work.