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Are People Who Take Frequent Breaks More Productive? (qz.com)
Dr. Travis Bradberry has a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology, and argues that "The eight-hour workday is an outdated and ineffective approach to work."
A study recently conducted by the Draugiem Group used a computer application to track employees' work habits. Specifically, the application measured how much time people spent on various tasks and compared this to their productivity levels. In the process of measuring people's activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: the length of the workday didn't matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.
The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest. People who maintained this schedule had a unique level of focus in their work. For roughly an hour at a time, they were 100% dedicated to the task they needed to accomplish. They didn't check Facebook "real quick" or get distracted by e-mails. When they felt fatigue (again, after about an hour), they took short breaks, during which they completely separated themselves from their work. This helped them to dive back in refreshed for another productive hour of work.
People who have discovered this magic productivity ratio crush their competition because they tap into a fundamental need of the human mind: the brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy (roughly an hour) followed by spurts of low energy (15 - 20 minutes).
He suggests breaking your day into rough hourly intervals, followed by "real" rest. "Getting away from your computer, your phone, and your to-do list is essential to boosting your productivity. Breaks such as walking, reading, and chatting are the most effective forms of recharging because they take you away from your work..."
"If you wait until you feel tired to take a break, it's too late -- you've already missed the window of peak productivity."
The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest. People who maintained this schedule had a unique level of focus in their work. For roughly an hour at a time, they were 100% dedicated to the task they needed to accomplish. They didn't check Facebook "real quick" or get distracted by e-mails. When they felt fatigue (again, after about an hour), they took short breaks, during which they completely separated themselves from their work. This helped them to dive back in refreshed for another productive hour of work.
People who have discovered this magic productivity ratio crush their competition because they tap into a fundamental need of the human mind: the brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy (roughly an hour) followed by spurts of low energy (15 - 20 minutes).
He suggests breaking your day into rough hourly intervals, followed by "real" rest. "Getting away from your computer, your phone, and your to-do list is essential to boosting your productivity. Breaks such as walking, reading, and chatting are the most effective forms of recharging because they take you away from your work..."
"If you wait until you feel tired to take a break, it's too late -- you've already missed the window of peak productivity."
Unsurprisingly, XKCD has a take on this: https://xkcd.com/323/
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm on my break.
There is no way this is 100% identical for everyone -- meaning 52 minutes for all? Pffft. And there's zero validation from a psychologist over deep brain chemistry, and how long glucose remains high / other factors.
But that said, of course there is a factor. And I bet 52 minutes was an average of some sort, with outliers excluded. Of what use is someone in the study that can only work 5 minutes... and of course there are such people, and they'd be excluded from the graph.
Same goes for people working for 4 hours without pause.
And of course, how much sleep did you get the night before? Are you coming down with a cold (but don't really feel it, other than a big less energetic)?
All said and done, I've worked at home for decades. And I tend to work a few hours.. then take a nap, have some food, and go back to it... and I do believe my productivity is higher.. because all I do is work. No IM, personal email, SMS, phone calls, browsing, etc...
But for me? It's a 'few hours'. Of course, waking up fresh from a nap probably helps a lot there too.
Does posting on Slashdot count as a "break"? Because if so my ratio is pretty good.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
People shouldn't even be allowed to take bathroom or lunch breaks during their shifts.
Feeding tubes and catheters should be installed in all employees, and GPS trackers should be placed in the skin to prevent them from wasting company time.
Employees are things and property to be used and disposed of as required by shareholders in order to make a profit.
...I work at a large corporation with 150K+ coworkers, and albeit we have a time span where we're expected to be on the clock so to speak, out managers look more at the net results (KPI) of what we do and achieve rather than how many breaks we took. They're perfectly aware of it though, they will often say, well - these break interwall's could be you going to the bathroom, taking a break, or helping a colleague etc, we can't know for sure why you have so many breaks (I actually asked my manager this out of pure curiosity), and that's how he reasoned with it - because at our monthly development talks, he never mentions that I'm taking too many breaks, just how happy he is about my performance.
So I think Bradberry is onto something there.
But "breaks" takes on many shapes, for example - it might not count as a break when we talk with out colleagues during work about the new house, car, their kids, their gaming, my ideas or theirs - but they're actually breaks too. Our break layout is split into 3 parts, one small 15 minute break between morning and lunch, then lunch, and then another 15 minutes before we end our shift.
However, every person is different, and we have those who take "smoke breaks" for 5 minutes each hour, those don't take the longer 15 minute breaks, and prefer to do that instead.
I try to keep the 15 minutes, but admittedly sometimes it's 20+ minutes, 30 minutes and I get a really bad conscience and work like mad to get the work done, but then again - I have the energy to do so. But even despite this, I have some of our teams top performance numbers. We have overseas partners within the company, that literally get "whipped" if they don't put in 1 hour overtime, and skip breaks, but their "error" ratio on their tickets is through the roof, whereas we who have the "luxury" of many breaks. have some of the lowest error rates.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
One-size-fits-all rules like this are basically bullshit statistical naval gazing. True that you can find a pattern if you glom together enough folks from enough jobs - but false that you can make a rule that will map back on to even a large portion of them.
The rule shouldn't be that enforced breaks will let you squeeze that last drop of productivity out of a beleagered employee drone - but rather, employees that figure out of their own limits and are given leeway to take whatever breaks allow themselves to be optimal can end up becoming more efficient.
Moreover, the goal shouldn't even be some mythical optimal output level - that itself is largely bullshit outside pure robotic-style activity. Sure - efficiency per dollar is important part of an overall evaluation - but the real issue is morale from employees in roles they have no full stake in other than punishment and fear of loss.
The whole employer-employee balance goes around in cycles - but that cycle is itself falling prey to the shifting waves of HR manipulation and political manipulation. Raises are increasingly something that never beat inflation except in extreme cases.
The political system is squeezing the legal system into cutting off all avenues for labor organization or preventing contracts from becoming absolutely insane. The whole idea of employment is shifting to more manipulative realms in more and more places.
So yeah - folks have to play motivational games with themselves to step out of the manipulation and unstable framework of their jobs, in order to perform better at their often perceptibly worthless tasks assigned to them. They often have almost no say at making their tasks themselves better.
The 'fix' in most cases isn't playing more of those motivational games - it's making the role itself less stagnant, in terms of outcome for the employee, and let them make the role more efficient as they go.
But that's not really the fashion of the day - so, go ahead with your enforced company synchronized dancing or whatever comes next.
Ryan Fenton
Anecdotally, I see this in myself. Unless I am under a short-time deadline (like one week or less), where I can absolutely push myself for a short sprint, I am absolutely more productive when I constantly doing 1-2 hours of work, then taking a 15 minute smoke break. The days when I am simply not able to make myself productive, I tend to just sit at the desk more.
I am more productive if I take deliberate frequent breaks and choose not to feel guilty about it. Measurably so. I also see huge benefits in completely seperating fun and work, such as *not* listening to music when I'm coding but simply leaving the headphones on for some silence.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest. People who maintained this schedule had a unique level of focus in their work.
Based on my experience he has it backwards. People who have a unique level of focus are very good at budgeting their time and know how to pace themselves.
In our office, the "boss's wife" is the one who actually runs things. Pretty much the entire office is scared to death of her. Not me...don't care...she wants me gone, then I'll take my talent elsewhere. She had a meeting with the administration staff a few weeks ago. One of the first things I heard that she said was "I want your butts in those chairs at 8am and except for lunch...I want them IN those chairs until exactly 5pm! Apparently, she didn't like the fact that one or two of the women admin staff were "changing clothes" (they like to work out after work), would get up at 4 minutes til 5pm, to change clothes. Like I said...she is the "ice princess"
I'm on break just now!
I vape. I find that vaping requires a more regular "hit" than actual cigarettes, so roughly every hour as opposed to every 1.,5-2 hours or so. I find that the act of walking down and back up the stairs, and getting some "fresh" air, not only helps my productivity through brain rest, but also because somehow, complex coding problems sometimes "come together" better when I'm not in front of the code. Not suggesting anyone addict themselves to nicotine, because you could achieve this without smoking/vaping, but the act of doing something completely different does seem to allow my brain to subconsciously put stuff together somehow.
This has even be set into a working habit called the Pomodoro technique: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
IMHO there is a structural problem in many "hybrid" (non developer-run) companies where non-technical, unskilled-technical (migrated to mgmt), or vaguely historically technical management need to see the technical staff "productively mirroring" their own highly social and highly multi-tasking management jobs.
The incentives are mostly aligned with willingness to butterfly from one urgent task/project/proposal to another. Aligned with making consistent, predicted, scheduled, budget (no surprises, no innovation) progress in one week intervals, even if one is only making low-hanging-fruit progress on easy problems, and avoiding the hard problems because they would get you in trouble with management quickly.
In these organizations, trying to get into and maintain flow state to work with sustained focus on actually hard technical problems (be it architecture, thoughtful requirements analysis, thorough survey of prior work, good design, good quality well-factored coding, etc) is usually punished. Would-be practitioners of focus are thought of as loners, mavericks, not communicating, missing administrative tasks, etc etc.
Even though those people, if given a conducive work environment, would almost always be the most productive contributors to sustainable and innovative s/w development. And if they had enough freedom from interruption, gratuitous extra meetings on random side topics, etc, then they could also choose their own natural focus-break times.
Are there any software workplaces like those described in my last paragraph? Somewhere over across the wide river?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
compulsively go to slashdot to try to get a first post?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is it merely the coincidence that across the entire planet, intervals of time are measured in hours? We schedule almost everything by default on hourly chunks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes it does help a lot ! I've been using Pomodoro technique for years and it does make a big difference. Plus, I'm a big fan of GTD methodology, so when you mix both, you'll get the perfect combo ! Here a good article on Zenkit blog, if you want to learn more about GTD... And it has David Allen's interview in it too ! https://zenkit.com/en/blog/dav...
Start a CD, work a while. when the CD ends take a break. Of course, now all my CDs are MP3 files.
So managers are most productive? They typically have a day of hour-long meetings, but those meeting boundaries involve walking around and non-meeting talk. And the beginning and end of any meeting are likely to not really be focused on the meeting topic yet. So this schedule sounds a lot like a manager's schedule.
It's unclear who funded this study but I somehow suspect it was middle management seeking a promotion.
There are lots of random, short online puzzles that are challenging on time.
I have one I like and if it takes me more than 5-7 minutes, I know it is time for a brisk walk.
..we don't just mindlessly pound out numbers day in and day out. We have needs just like any other animal on the planet, and we need to 'cool down'
Even robots need to be taken off line for maintenence, repairs, upgrades, etc....
America is founded by people so uptight that the English wanted to kick them out.
The American Puritan Work Ethic is really a two sided coin.
Americans tend to connect their self worth to their career. When someone is having problems the initial response is "You need to work harder!" which often makes us self conscious when ever we are not working. There seems to be something else we need to do. If we are not working there better be a good reason to.
Sure we have Lazy people who will do the minimum, and would take these breaks as excuses to not be working, however for most people if something comes up on a break they would be happy to help.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wow, I'm going to be ultra productive very soon
... doesn't like to idle for so long, so I must move around. Also, it likes to pee and poop a lot these days. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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Casteism
So if I'm supposed to work 52 minutes without being distracted, then have a 17-minute real break away from the computer, when is the time to post memes, read Facebook and be a slob?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
When I studied in Sweden, there was a 45 min lecture, followed by 15 min break.
Then back at it again.
This was done in the 1980s when a study showed that students lost focus after roughly 45-1 hour.
Not surprising that it also applies to work...
My father, who programmed back in the days of COBOL, would get up and leave a meeting if it went longer than an hour. He knew nothing productive happened after that point anyway, and his company didn't have the stones to fire him.
Smokers should be the most productive people on the planet. 15 min smoke break every hour. That sounds about right.
Yeah, my college did 50 minutes in the early 90's based on research - this isn't new info on concentration.
However there are different neurotypes and what should be recognized decades later is that one-size-fits-all is a stupid approach.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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