Let's do lunch
Why taking a midday break can seriously enhance productivity“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
The immortal words of Douglas Adams, perhaps truer now than they ever have been. Despite 85% of companies saying they don’t mind workers taking their full allocation of lunchtime (often an hour), most of us take only a quarter of that, and that quarter we’ll often spend sitting right back down at our desks.
A bit of guilt-free internet browsing, perhaps catching up on a few internetty chores. Lunchtime has just become another way to spend time back on our work computers, procrastinating in the same way you might when it’s not lunchtime too. How much of a ‘break’ is your lunch, really? By ostensibly working more, are we somehow ending up working less?
If you have a pipe, I suggest you take these statistics and smoke them thoughtfully: on average, in 2012, a UK worker was more than 20% less productive than those in other G7 countries, and more than 30% less productive than the French. Not so lazy after all, eh mes amis. We work longer and harder but achieve roughly the same results.
While reading comment sections on newspapers online might lead you to believe that workers in the UK are fundamentally broken, let’s rein it in a little.
You’ve probably heard of decision fatigue. If you haven’t, well, the short version is the more decisions you have to make in a row, the worse you get at it. Everything counts. What to eat for breakfast. What to wear. Should I take an umbrella?
Inevitably, most people’s work is also a series of decisions – what’s a priority, what to write, who to talk to, etc. A proper break serves to recharge those batteries, and allows you to wipe away the accumulated fatigue.
You don’t rest from a marathon by going for a jog. Sitting back down at the computer doesn’t cut it as a break. If you find yourself slumping in front of your TV at the end of the day, you’re probably suffering from excessive decision fatigue – you can’t face taking any more of them. You might think that also helps you recharge, but you’d be wrong – it often actively makes you feel worse.
What is known is that failing to takes breaks isn’t be good for you. You don’t just need to take my word for it though. BUPA recommends 5-10 minute breaks every hour, and a 15 minute break from screens after two hours – recommendations few of us probably manage.
It’s harder to relax in places that you work, and failing to take adequate breaks impacts both your performance and your stress levels. And no, coffee breaks don’t count.
The alternative then is to take lunch seriously, like the French, who manage to squeeze in an hour, or even two hour long lunch breaks. That’s on top of their legally protected 35 hour working week. There shouldn’t be guilt in walking outside and relaxing for an hour, if it means you return focused and refreshed (and ideally fed). It doesn’t matter what you do – all that matters is it is something else, somewhere else.
You could be happier, healthier and just as productive as you are now by incorporating a real lunch break into your schedule. The most common excuse for a short lunch break in the UK is having too great a workload. This year there are 253 working days in the UK, and statistics estimate (conservatively, probably) that the average worker wastes 28 days per year on stuff like tea, gossip, online shopping et al.
So that’s more than 10% of total time spent at work not working at all, and that doesn’t even include mandated breaks. So you’re not fooling anybody with that high workload malarkey. Get out there and relax like you mean it, soldier.
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