For most people, mid-morning is one of the busiest parts of the work day. Those 10 o’clock and 11 o’clock hours come after we’ve caffeinated ourselves, waded through morning email, caught up with colleagues and read up on the day’s news. It’s when meetings are held, our brains seem to function best and the real work of the day begins.
But it’s also the most beneficial time of day to take a break, according to new research by professors at Baylor University.
That counter-intuitive finding many people after all would think the mid-afternoon lull is best for a work pause was one of a few suggestions for better break-taking in a recent paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The researchers also showed that what makes breaks most beneficial is that you’re doing something you like and something you choose, more so than that you’re stepping away from the job entirely.
The researchers aimed to take a prescriptive approach to break-taking, something they say isn’t studied enough in the academic literature. While there have been studies from software companies, for instance, reporting a productivity recipe (52 minutes of hard work, followed by a 17 minute break), academic research on breaks have been more experimental in nature and less focused on the average desk worker’s day, the researchers said.
Hunter and Wu asked 95 people who worked primarily in administrative jobs at a university to fill out surveys every time they took breaks over the course of a five-day work week, asking them both before and after the break about their levels of energy, motivation and concentration. The surveys also asked about things like eyestrain, lower back pain and how well they had slept the night before, as well as about their levels of emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction at the end of the week. The researchers ended up with 959 break surveys in their sample.
One of their key findings, Hunter said, is that participants reported more energy, concentration and motivation after breaks in the mid-morning than they did following afternoon breaks. This wasn’t just because people were still more rested in the morning, she said, because they were able to control for that factor.
Hunter and Wu’s research also asked people what they did while on their breaks. And they found little evidence that going for a walk or gabbing about the men’s U.S. Open final led to feeling more restored than doing something work-related (though not actual work), such as chatting with a colleague about the boss or answering work email away from your desk.
What did help? The break activity just had to be something the respondent liked more than their usual work.
The pair’s finding follows other seemingly counter-intuitive research. A professor at Portland State University, Charlotte Fritz, found that when it comes to “micro-breaks” pauses during the workday that are shorter, say, than lunch breaks doing work-related things such as praising a colleague or writing a to-do list were the only activities that resulted in an increase in people’s reported energy.
Finally, Hunter and Wu found little evidence that longer breaks had more positive effects, but their data did indicate the value of taking frequent short breaks throughout the day.
And if multiple breaks are out of the question when you’re buried under a mountain of work? Make sure the one you skip is the 3 p.m. coffee. “If you can only take one break,” Hunter said, “then the mid-morning one is going to be more effective than taking one at lunch or in the afternoon.”
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