4 Productive Breaks to Take Throughout The Day

Adjust your schedule to your body’s natural rhythm

Productivity masters are not just people who can make more out of their time but they are also experts at knowing when to take a break and how to switch their mind to rest when it’s time to rest.

So far, my greatest ideas that perform well in architecture school and at work have come from coincidences when I organized my breaks in the right way. In a past architecture workshop, sleeping has also given me and my team the idea that ended up saving us from a crisis. During that workshop, after receiving harsh feedback on our ideas, my team decided to call it a day, to sleep early, and to deconstruct the best performing ideas that we watched from other teams during the afternoon. The next morning, we returned to the site to redo our investigation, but this time, having enough sleep helped us to find the right ideas. We fell into this collective flow state — we kept building on top of each others’ ideas and somehow knowing how to build them in a way that will work well.

When a problem is too difficult to solve and people say “just sleep on it”, that advice truly worked for us.

There are a lot of other stories of people who got their best groundbreaking ideas after sleeping. In fact, some of the most mindblowing works that we know were inspired by the creators’ dream — from Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Carl Jung’s The Red Book, even the very functional sewing machine that we use.

Sleeping can be a powerful thinking tool because there are many mental processes that happen exclusively at sleep. During sleep, there is highly coordinated communication between different regions of the brain which is the key mental process for creativity.

In fact, it’s not just when we are sleeping. According to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang from the University of Southern California, our brain uses every resting opportunity to organize information that we have recently learned, to replay and learn from previous experiences, and to sift through our disappointments, desires, and moral standing for solutions. This includes every waking moment when our attention is at rest, which is why we often have an epiphany while we shower or when we are daydreaming.

There are many types of cognitive resting states— from Lo-Beta brain waves that happen during idle musing, Alpha waves that happen when we are truly in the present to Delta waves during sleep.

By knowing how to appropriately place these breaks, we can stop spending more hours than necessary on simple tasks and spend more time on the more important ones.

Other than having enough nocturnal sleep, here are other tips on how to incorporate varying types of break into your routine.

1. Ultradian Rythm and Short Breaks

We go throughout the day continuously burning up our mental energy with no period of recovery which leaves us more exhausted by the end of the day.

Meanwhile our brain, just like most organs in our body, naturally works in cycles.

Research by sleep specialist Nathaniel Kleitman suggests that the brain can only retain attention up to 90–120 minutes. Passed that, our brain stops being productive — we feel fatigued, have difficulty thinking coherently and we start recycling the same thought patterns.

That’s why it’s not productive to have a meeting that stretches to 2 or 3 hours without break — it’s true when people say that the most productive meeting is organized based on the optimum attention span instead of trying to give equal time and attention to every item on the agenda.

Researchers suggest arranging your work according to your brain’s natural cycle by alternating your activities between 90 minutes of strenuous mental activities with 20 minutes of mindless activities.

With this principle, we need to be more sensitive to how different activities demand different levels of mental energy, and to schedule mindless automatic activities in between sprint of an intense mental workout. Here are some examples of mindless activities that you can use for breaks:

• Mindless administrative tasks such as visiting another department to fetch a document or doing photocopy and organizing your archive
• Take a short walk, like maybe to the nearby coffee shop. Prolonged sitting can cause diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression, muscle, and joint problem. Yet, we spend an average of 10 hours sitting at work. Short breaks can be a good opportunity to correct your posture after hours of sitting.
• Spend some time in the nearest outdoor garden. Mindfulness is one of the most efficient methods for fatigue recovery, and if you are not a good meditation practitioner, nature’s tactile form is often successful in reducing stress through sensory experiences.
• Visit your friend in the workshop, laboratories, or interesting departments in your office. They are usually up to something interesting to watch and you might also get inspiration for your own work.
• If you are at home, you can even schedule house chores and grocery shopping for breaks.

To further maximize your break, mute your phone, and shut down any form of distractions. Just reading one work-related email can switch your mind back to actively thinking and prevent your mind from fully recovering.

2. Interim Reset by Napping

A study suggests that short breaks can help with fatigue prevention, but it can not help with fatigue recovery that can only be achieved through sleep. The previous tips on short breaks can only sustain your energy until you have the opportunity to take a nap, like during the lunch break.

Napping after work also helps you to get the most out of your 5 to 9 shift if you are working on your side project after hours.

You might not have a lot of time for a nap in your lunch break, but actually you just need not more than 10 minutes to have an effective nap. In Scientific America, Ferris Jabr summarises finding from the study by Amber Brooks and Leon Lack on the most optimal time for a recuperative nap following a night of minimal sleep:

A five-minute nap barely increased alertness, but naps of 10, 20 and 30 minutes all improved the students’ scores. But volunteers that napped 20 or 30 minutes had to wait half an hour or more for their sleep inertia to wear off before regaining full alertness, whereas 10-minute naps immediately enhanced performance just as much as the longer naps without any grogginess.

If your workplace does not provide a specific place to nap as Google does, it’s time to make an investment on a good neck-pillow and a sleep mask so you can have a good nap on your desk.

3. The Power of The In-Between Minutes

Sometimes, when your work schedule demands you to be very mobile, you have to be smart in using every small window of time that you have in between your activities — like when you are waiting for someone or when you are in public transportation waiting to reach our destination.

During college, I would usually do my assigned reading during 2 hours round trip of commuting every day. Strangely, I would retain most of my reading in memory if I read it on a 1-hour tram ride rather than if I read it while sitting in a library for 2–3 hours. This way, I was also able to finish the bite-size tasks to free up more time for tasks that require uninterrupted attention.

The secrets of these in-between minutes come down to this:

• These in-between moments are usually followed by activities such as walking or having lunch, which can be considered as mental breaks. Alternating your short work session with these breaks allow your mind to process every new information which results in better retaining of information. After my tram reached my stop, I would have to walk for 15 minutes before I reach my destination. This period of walking after reading allows my subconscious to reorganize what I have read during my tram ride.
• In these in-between moments, most of the time you have no idea when you will have to move to the next actions. Not knowing when your time will be up will put you on edge — you stop procrastinating and start prioritizing your task. If you have a task that you keep delaying, such as replaying to a difficult email or choosing what to eat for lunch, you can use these in-between moments to make a quick decision.
• Humans’ attention can not hold on to many things at once. The fewer things you try to remember at a time, the better you will remember them. When we only have a short time to do our task, we will try to only do one or two things at once, which works well with how our brain is wired.

This method was also used by a top performer in the GMAT test by carrying his study books and notes to the office and to use every 15 minutes he has at work to study. Surprisingly, there are many in-between moments like these in the office — when we are waiting for our turn at the photocopying machine or waiting for our supervisor to finish his meeting.

4. Pre-Sleep Relaxation and Visual Overwriting

We know that we need a break before we sleep to stop our minds from thinking about our next schedule or previous conversation we had during the day. But it is also difficult to stick to our pre-sleep relaxation habits — to read a book, write a journal, or to make a tea as sleep experts recommend you to do before sleeping. At the end of the day, we are exhausted and we lack willpower — most of the time, we simply can’t resist the temptation of choosing a night of binge-watching our favorite series rather than good habits that experts have recommended.

Watching TV is not one of the activities that sleep experts recommend to do — the background noise might help you to sleep faster, but the blue light might reduce your sleep quality.

But, if experts also emphasized the importance of going to sleep at the same time every day, and watching TV has consistently helped us to sleep, why not temporarily indulge in this habit to build a habit of sleeping at a consistent time?

Knowing that 60% of Americans watch TV before sleeping, Chris Brantner, a certified sleep science coach recommended that tweaking your pre-sleep TV habits might be more favorable than a night of sleep deprivation:

Since anxiety and the inability to quiet thoughts is one of the primary reasons people have trouble sleeping, it stands to reason that if the TV helps you calm down, you may as well use it to get to sleep.

Watching TV before sleeping is also recommended by Tim Ferris in his book Tools of Titans:

“Visual overwriting” is what I do right before bed to crowd out anything replaying or looping in my mind that will inhibit sleep (e.g., email, to-do lists, an argument, “I should have said…”)

Watching TV and playing a short game, such as Tetris or Candy Crush Saga, help you to sleep better because it shuts the overactive part of your brain. Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. explains that playing games can help overwrite negative visualization which has application to addiction, due to the visually intensive, problem-solving characteristics of the games.

You see visual flashbacks [e.g., the blocks falling or the pieces swapping]. They occupy the visual processing center of your brain so that you cannot imagine the thing that you’re craving [or obsessing over, which are also highly visual].

But, as Chris Brantner mentioned, watching TV is only a last-resort method if other methods don’t work.

The point of indulging in watching TV pre-sleep is to build a habit of sleeping at a consistent time every day — eventually, we will need to slowly transition into healthier pre-sleep rituals such as reading books as mentioned by sleep experts.