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16 Dec 09 Is Taking Break Killing Your Productivity?

You will not find too many people who talks against taking break during your work because not many people have thought about the real impact of “taking breaks” on your productivity. Taking break while working does affect your productivity, and how it will affect your productivity is directly related to the number of breaks and duration of each breaks.

Shorter and not-too-frequent breaks revive our senses and boost up our productivity, but when breaks tend to get longer and more frequent, we start losing focus.

Why does it happen?

To understand this let’s ask ourselves why we take breaks during the days. We take break to free up our mind from the task at hand so that we can relax and get more fresh idea when we return back to working. A break helps us focus our mind on seeing forest instead of focusing on trees, which helps us complete our work quickly.

But,

When the breaks get longer, we lose the momentum, and ideas that were building up while working on the project slips put of our mind, which means poor incoherent output. The longer breaks clear up information related to the problems from our mind, and when we return we need to rethink on where we were and at what point we took break. Most of the time, after loss of some quality time, things starts coming to us, but there is no guarantee that everything will return back. Longer breaks take us out of the zone.

How many and how long?

Do not take more than 2-3 breaks during the work hour, you can stretch the limit to 4, but not even a single break more than that. And the duration of the break should depend upon the time of the day. If you are taking a break in the morning, which I do not recommend, then the break should not be 2-3 minutes long, but when the break is coming towards the end of the day when you are exhausted with the day’s work, you can make the break a little longer. 8-10 minutes will be good enough for the last break.

Taking breaks during the work is important, but taking too many and too long breaks throw us out of the productivity zone.

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Tags: Break Free, , , Frequent Breaks, Fresh Idea, Guarantee, , Point Break, , Quality Time, Senses, Taking A Break, Time Of The Day, , Working On The Project

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