Take substantial breaks to improve your productivity
Summary
- Taking a significant break every so often improves our self-control drastically
Details
- In a study done in 2008 by Tyler and Kathleen Burns, students were told to stand on one leg and count down by seven from 2000. then they were divided into 3 groups. one group were given a 1-min break, the second a 3 minute break and the third a 10 minute break. Thereafter they were given a handgrip and told to squeeze it for as long as they could.
- The 1 min and 3 min groups both squeezed for a relatively short period (34 and 43 seconds respectively) the 10min group squeezed for 72 seconds.
- Taking a break is good for our productivity.
- Another study showed that the most productive workers took 52 min of work to 17 min of rest.
References
Quotes
In 2008, psychologists James Tyler and Kathleen Burns invited sixty undergraduate students into their lab. One by one, the students were asked to turn away from the researcher and begin a draining task: stand on one leg and count down by seven from 2000 (2000, 1993, 1986, 1979…) for six minutes. Students might have thought they were being tested on their
arithmetic. In fact, Tyler and Burns were much more interested in the second part of the experiment. In the wake of their one-legged exertions, the students were randomly split into three groups. One got a one-minute break before proceeding to the next task; another got a three-minute break; and the luckiest group got a whole tenminute break before proceeding. The experimenters then asked the students to come back into the main laboratory. Once again, they were asked to turn around to face away from the experimenter. But this time the task was different. This time they were given a handgrip and asked to squeeze it with their non-dominant hand for as long as they could. As they did, an experimenter secretly timed how long they could hold on.
You might think that gripping something is purely a measure of hand strength. But that’s not what the researchers found. In fact, the key determinant of hand-gripping success was the length of their breaks. There wasn’t much difference between the first two groups: the one-minute group squeezed the handgrip for 34 seconds on average, the three-minute group for 43 seconds. The ten-minute group was different. On average, they squeezed the handgrip for 72 seconds. Their conclusion was simple: adding a break of just ten minutes between two tasks that require self-control seems to help combat overexertion.
Tyler and Burns’s study hints at the last way to conserve our energy. So far, we’ve learned the importance of simply saying no and of eliminating distraction. Which misses a final ingredient. Because the truth is, within every day you need time for a break. And more time than you might imagine.
In fact, the people who seem to get the most done are often those who’ve turned doing nothing for large chunks of time into a fine art. In one study, the software company Draugiem Group set out to find out how much time people spent on various tasks and how it related to each worker’s productivity. The workers who were most productive were not the ones who chained themselves to their desks. Nor were they the ones who gave themselves a healthy-sounding five-minute break every hour. The most productive workers gave themselves an almost unbelievable amount of time off: a work-to-break ratio of fifty two minutes of work to seventeen minutes of rest. So the last step to conserve your energy is even simpler than the
first two: find moments in your working day to do nothing. And embrace them