If you’re an average worker, you take a few minutes every hour to accomplish something besides what you’re paid to do. This was true long before cat GIFs and Slack emojis; as far back as 1940, according to an early study of break behavior, clerical workers were slipping away for three precious personal minutes an hour. The latest estimate, with the Internet era in full effect, is closer to seven minutes and change—or some 58 minutes away for a full eight-hour work day.
Taking 10 percent of the paid day for your own pleasure might seem like a gross violation of employer trust. But pacing yourself is key in a connected age that extends the work day far beyond the proverbial punch card, and brings greater risk of burnout. Businesses themselves clearly appreciate the productivity benefits of a little time away; just look at the increased prevalence of office amenities that encourage breaks, from nap pods to super slides.
Courtesy Rosan Bosch
So the key question isn’t really whether or not breaks are a good idea, but what types of breaks do the best job restoring an employee’s capacity to handle the tasks ahead. There’s no magic formula, of course, but a look at the most recent evidence on this emerging line of inquiry produces seven intriguing insights—one for every minute you were going to take off this hour anyway.
Many of our cognitive resources—and indeed, the very size of our brains—diminish as the day goes on. On one hand, that might seem like a reason to do as 5-Hour Energy suggests and take a late break to avoid That 2:30 Feeling. On the other hand, if there is a steady decline in our abilities, it could make sense to break early and stay near the top of the performance chart as long as possible.
To test that question (among several others), management scholars Emily Hunter and Cindy Wu of Baylor University recently asked 95 employees to record their break activity every day for a work week. Hunter and Wu also collected data on levels of concentration, physical and emotional fatigue, and job satisfaction. Their results, reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology, show pretty clearly that breaks taken earlier in the shift led to better outcomes than those taken later.
"We found that when more hours had elapsed since the beginning of the work shift, fewer resources and more symptoms of poor health were reported after a break," they write. "Therefore, breaks later in the day seem to be less effective. . . ."
The findings align with previous conceptual work arguing for the "front-loading of rest breaks" over a schedule that spaced out breaks evenly throughout the day. Obviously you don’t want to take a break right when you get to the office. But the general idea is that breaking early keeps your faculties near the high settings they had when the day began, so by the time the work day is done, they won’t have dipped so drastically.
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