How to take a break that will boost your productivity — Smart Business Academy

7 min readApr 8, 2021

We all like to take breaks, heck, it’s one of the main reasons we do most things 😊 What we don’t realize is that there are smart ways to take a break and, well, not so smart ones. I’ll dive below into why it is important to take breaks and how you can make them productive.

Key Points

The most productive work/break ratio is 52/17
We need to take meaningful breaks in order to be productive
Stress + Rest = Growth
Scrolling through Social Media is not an efficient break
6 minutes of walking increases your productivity by at least 40%
Just 1 minute of mindfulness meditation can increase your ability to focus
Take short naps if possible

Why taking a break is important?

Although some managers would like people to work continuously this is not sustainable and just unproductive. Actually, studies have shown that the best work/break ratio sits at 52 minutes of work followed by 17 minutes of break. This might seem a lot to some people but one of the most important factors that separate super-productive people (in the 10%) from regular ones is the ability to take breaks.

Somehow, our culture associates long repeated breaks with laziness. But this is quite the opposite. If you don’t take strategic breaks this could affect the quality of your work, your mood and will eventually lead to burndown. You see that I wrote “strategic breaks”, this means that some of the breaks we take from “deep work” aren’t really breaks and don’t really benefit us.

Be cautious about the difference between breaks and interruptions. Interruptions, as discussed previously, are messing with our deep work while breaks are conscious moments in which we recover from periods of concentration.

The process for productivity

The framework for being productive is quite simple and I will not insist on it here. It contains the following steps:

Plan what you need to accomplish next week.
Plan every day the evening before by scheduling time-blocks of dedicated work.
Protect those time blocks from interruptions.
Take meaningful breaks between the time blocks.
Adapt and repeat.

Though simple in theory, it takes a while to get into this spiral of productivity. The good news is that once you get the ball moving you will probably not look back.

So, breaks are one of the most important elements of this framework. But what do we mean by meaningful breaks?

Actually, in their bestselling book, “Peak Performance”, authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness came up with an equation for sustained growth of world renowned athletes. And this equation is:

As written in their book, this applies to top performers in each domain, from triathlon to programmers and successful CEOs.

Let’s look at some of the most efficient ways to take breaks.

Take a meaningful break

We often associate breaks with other types of activities that require our focus. For example, we take a break from writing an article to check our e-mails. Or to check our Facebook feed, scroll through Instagram or even watch a short episode on Netflix. These breaks are not actually useful and make even more harm than good. The main reason they are not effective is that you don’t really get disconnected. We already know that Social Media is not relaxing you, as each scroll gives you the dopamine shot needed to keep you wanting for more. Also, they are not effective because we plan to take a 5-minute break and we find ourselves doing this for an hour or maybe more.

Ok, so being on Tik-Tok is not a good type of break, but then what are some ways to take efficient breaks, time that helps you disconnect and replenish your creativity and concentration effort?

Take a short walk

There are many benefits associated with walks. A lot of famous people were and are using walking in their thinking process.

A study done at Stanford in 2014 shows that 6-minutes of walking outdoor increases your creativity by more than 60%. Even indoor walking increases it by 40%, so if the weather is not good you can do some walking in your house (the bigger the better in this case ☺️).

Walking has multiple benefits. One would be disconnecting from your deep work. Also, because it’s a movement that doesn’t require too much focus and coordination, you can also use it to think about a problem that you are facing. A lot of ideas come from walking.

Walking can serve as a separation between work and personal life. A lot of people have this issue, especially when working from home. In the past, you would drive or take the subway to your home once the workday was over. That meant you had a clear separation between your professional and personal life. As this doesn’t happen anymore in the “new” situation a lot of people have a hard time separating the two modes and there is a lot of spill from your work-life to your personal one. A walk can do just that, provide the space you need to jump from one aspect of your life to the other.

Also, walking is very beneficial for your overall health. There is a new quote that is popular these days, stating that “sitting is the new smoking”. Studies have shown that just 2 minutes of walking every waking hour can decrease the risk of premature death by 33%. That is impressive, so just a 2-minute walk during a break can greatly decrease some health risks.

Look at nature or cute animal photos

Not everyone has the chance to go on a stroll in the forest. A lot of us live in busy cities with not even parks nearby. So, how can we get the benefits of relaxation cited before? The answer is simple and strange: Look at pictures of nature. Even though not as effective as actually walking between trees, studies have shown that just looking at pictures of nature, like on national geographic, relaxes us and can detach us. Also, a study from the Hiroshima University says that looking at photos of cute animals increases our productivity.

Meditate

I am not an expert in meditation and I will not insist on this here. Mindfulness meditation has a lot of benefits, proven by multiple studies. In short, meditation helps to be productive by stretching “the mindfulness muscle” of your brain as well as relaxing the stress responses of our brain with respect to deep work and difficult problems. You can start with 1 minute per day of breathing meditation, you could then go into guided meditation and body scans.

Talk to your friends or colleagues

Another efficient way of taking breaks is through “social recovery”, by hanging out with people you care about. This can be going out for lunch with colleagues or just having a 5-minute conversation between work sessions. Just make sure you don’t talk about work in order to properly relax your mind. This is why people feel energized after a night out with friends. This detachment is especially prolific when it involves people that you hold dear. Just make sure you don’t exaggerate with those🍸.

Take a short nap

The benefits of sleep are enormous and sleeping between 7 to 9 hours each night is the single most important thing you can start doing today in order to increase your productivity. I will dedicate an entire post to this as the science is just overwhelming when it comes to why sleeping is crucial for your well-being.

Aside from the usual night sleep, what we could do during the day if our program and context permit us, is to take short naps. Napping is one of the key productivity habits of a lot of successful people. From Albert Einstein to Winston Churchill, a napping habit is what made them cope with their everyday sustained effort.

Aside from the historical facts, there are also recent studies that tell us why napping is a good idea.

A nap can increase our productivity, our creativity, can prevent heart diseases and just makes us feel energized.

The most efficient nap is the Power nap, which consists of between 20 and 30 minutes. This makes us wake up more alert and ready for work, more than a cup of coffee can. Make sure you don’t snooze for more than that because you will get into what’s called “sleep inertia”. This happens when you pass the 30 minutes mark and get into a deep sleep phase. Waking up from this stage will make you feel groggy.

If you have the time, sleeping for 90 minutes will get you through a complete sleep cycle and will boost your productivity for the rest of the day. But not too many of us have this opportunity.

So, take naps, especially after lunch, at around 2–3 PM, cause that’s when our energy levels go down the most during the day. Be careful though, as this might be socially unacceptable, depending on the medium. But, if you are working from home and you can take a break, do this instead of watching a “Family Guy” episode.

Conclusions on efficient breaks

The human mind and body cannot sustain long periods of effort without small breaks. What is important to mention here is that we talked only about taking small breaks during the workday. Another key factor for your long-term performance and productivity is related to how you spend your weekends and taking time off from work regularly. But that’s another story.

Remember that you could get into a lot of trouble if you work continuously, ranging from decreased quality of work, to making mistakes and just feeling really tired and unhappy through the day.

So, remember to take smart, strategic breaks during the day.

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See you soon!

Originally published at https://leoalexandru.com on April 8, 2021.