Take a Break!

We are all striving to be more productive and the get as much done as we can within the given work day. For many this means not taking a break which actually is proven to hamper productivity.

The standard working week of 40hours is constantly being extended as people push themselves to meet expectations, targets and ensure that they maintain their jobs. The "work until you drop" culture is not only unproductive but it could also be detrimental to our health. People who work longer hours are more prone to illness and injury which in the long term benefits no one.

Industrial companies put a lot of effort in to "asset integrity" - which really just means protecting critical plants and machinery from damage and wear and tear.

Within the service industries should companies not be doing the same where their people are their only assets?

Conflictingly financial services, consulting, the law and even the medical profession perpetuate working hours where all-nighters are heroic, driving with jet lag is the norm and anyone who actually has lunch risks becoming lunch.

For the last 100 years every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: after about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade. You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: you’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: there isn’t as much mess to clean up.

With regard to multi tasking, when the cognitive scientist Dan Simons looked at the vast mountain of evidence that demonstrates the futility of it, he was inevitably asked whether there were anything we could do to enlarge the capacity of our minds to which the answer was an emphatic no.

Simons said that the one thing that truly enhances cognition is exercise.
Experiments by his colleague Arthur Kramer showed that walking for a few hours a week led to large improvements on cognitive tasks. Stretching and toning exercises had no cognitive benefits, but aerobic exercise, which increases blood flow to the brain, did. Seniors who walked for just 45 minutes a day for three days a week showed better preservation of their brains in MRI scans. Exercise, Simons concludes, improves cognition broadly by increasing the fitness of your brain.

Instead of setting unrealistic demands upon yourself or expectations for others you should take a break! Step away from the desk at the very least over your lunch break and if your the boss encourage it and lead by example. After all it's called a lunch "break" for a reason!