We Should Encourage Stepping Away

Prevent burnout by limiting workload, stepping away, and decreasing hours.

Burnout is almost inevitable. Especially in a field dependent on a fleeting attribute such as creativity, productivity ebbs and flows naturally. A key to avoiding burnout is to embrace downturns, be it from lack of ideas or lack of motivation.

Recently, I’ve struggled to write. The month is halfway over, and I only managed to publish one article right at the beginning of the month. Additionally, I haven’t been motivated to make any art. My creativity was drained. Instead of pushing through for the sake of maintaining my schedule, I stepped away.

Burnout doesn’t just negatively impact yourself, but also the work you are putting out.

Schedules are great but don’t need to be strictly followed

A big productivity suggestion I see and personally advocate for is setting a schedule. Defining goals with deadlines or schedules help clear up ambiguity and push us towards achieving them, as explained by this report:

By focusing on the assigned deadlines as goals we avoid some of the conceptual ambiguity of what constitutes a goal. So, “I want to finish this report” could be seen as an intention and a vague goal. “I plan to finish this report tomorrow” is a somewhat more specific goal, and “My boss wants the report on her desk by 2 p.m. tomorrow” is even more precise and clear. As an assigned deadline goal it avoids most of the definitorial problems associated with intentions and self-set goals. — Mitchell, T. R., Harman, W. S., Lee, T. W., & Lee, D. Y.

Setting a schedule can help you stick to your goals and keep you disciplined. However, if you are feeling burned out or out of ideas, don’t be afraid to switch up your schedule or pause it altogether.

Schedules are a great guideline, but temporarily breaking or altering your schedule can help you maintain productivity in the long term by limiting or eliminating factors that contribute to burnout. Flexibility in your schedule will serve to prevent burnout and maximize productivity.

Workers engaged in formal flexibility options reported less stress and burnout than workers without these options, and that use of flextime alone in particular was associated with less stress and burnout. — Grzywacz, J. G., Carlson, D. S., & Shulkin, S.

In a similar vein, different schedules work for different people. Restricting employees to rigid work hours can inhibit efficiency. People’s productivity peaks at different times of the day.

Older adults’ peak performance on memory and cognitive inhibition tasks tends to be in the morning while younger adults’ peak performance tends to be in the afternoon. — Knight, M., & Mather, M.

In the workplace, a simple solution to capitalize on workers’ varying peak performance time is to implement variable work hours.

Aytekin Tank, Editor of The Startup and CEO of JotForm, implements this strategy:

At JotForm, we have flexible hours for our employees. As I wrote in “Why waking up at 6 am won’t make you successful”, everybody works differently and every person has a different internal prime time.

Limiting workload and hours limits burnout

A key factor to burnout is your workload and number of work hours. Decreasing either of these factors can better help you battle burnout.

Almost all studies on the effect of working hours on employees’ health revealed adverse effects indicating a tendency toward burnout. — Sabine Bährer-Kohler

The risk of burnout can be directly associated with the number of work hours per week and rises linearly with an increase in hours.

The number of hours worked per week was associated directly and linearly with the “frenetic” burnout sub-type in such a way that when the number of hours was increased, so was the risk of developing this burnout profile. — Montero-Marín, J., García-Campayo, J., Fajó-Pascual, M. et al.

Eliminating the 40-hour workweek is an important way to improve productivity. In a study scoring participants on the risk of burnout, participants working more than 40 hours per week had a greater likelihood of having a high score than those who worked less than 35 hours per week.

Reducing your workload as well as work hours will help you combat burnout. It might hurt productivity in the short term, but improves the longevity of productivity and motivation.

Reducing the identified job demands and increasing the most important job resources, which, in turn, may decrease the risk for burnout and consequently improve performance at the task and contextual level. — Bakker, A. B., Demerouti, E., & Verbeke, W.

The key to burnout is maintaining intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation “is an energizing of behavior that comes from within an individual, out of will and interest for the activity at hand.” When we lack intrinsic motivation, we are at an increased risk of burnout and are also at risk of decreased performance. If you want to learn more about intrinsic (and extrinsic) motivation, you can read a piece I wrote about the subject here:

Taking breaks increases productivity and creativity

Stepping away and taking breaks can improve your efficiency and boost creativity. Taking breaks allows you to conserve mental energy so that you can continue to focus, especially when working on a task that requires a higher level of concentration.

Especially on days on which high work engagement is needed, employees should self-initiate short breaks. What first seems contradictory, because working time is “lost” during breaks, enables employees to focus on and engage in work later during the day. — Kühnel, J., Zacher, H., De Bloom, J., & Bledow, R.

Self-initiated breaks allow you to better concentrate on tasks. Taking breaks when needed should be allowed and actively encouraged by employers.

To enable employees to take short breaks, employers should allow employees to self-initiate short breaks when they are needed. Moreover, it is important that a recovery-friendly climate is established at work so that employees actually make use of opportunities to take short breaks. — Kühnel, J., Zacher, H., De Bloom, J., & Bledow, R.

In addition to improving focus and productivity, taking breaks can foster creativity.

Not detaching from work during leisure time seems to be a prerequisite for continuous work-related problem-solving attempts. In cases of high cognitive job demands and resources, low detachment from work might lead to efficient problem solving and thus to increased learning and creative behavior. — de Jonge, J., Spoor, E., Sonnentag, S., Dormann, C., & van den Tooren, M.

When you don’t allow yourself to stop thinking about work, it hampers creativity. So when you take breaks- and stop thinking about work- you allow yourself the opportunity to be more creative when you do return to your work.

The importance of breaks is the basis of the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method. The method, developed by Francesco Cirillo, combines breaks with the importance of setting deadlines. You work in 25-minute sprints, with short breaks in between. After 4 sessions of working, you take a longer 20–30-minute break to rest and refresh your brain before you continue working.

Final Thoughts

Implementing breaks into our workflow both on a micro and macro scale can improve motivation, efficiency, and productivity. Schedule flexibility can allow for different employees to take advantage of their peak performance hours. Reducing weekly work hours also contributes to avoiding burnout. Additionally, increasing breaks within a workday improves mental resource allocation for tasks and can improve productivity, especially when used within a productivity workflow such as the Pomodoro technique.