Fast Company: Your calendar is probably full of things to do, but how often do you schedule in breaks? If it’s rare to find a blank space on your calendar, you should rethink your nonstop workflow. Taking regular timeouts can help you refresh your focus and get more done, productivity experts say. And how often you should break depends on your workload, energy level ,and the time of day.
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In an intense environment like CMU, and especially in an intense program there like ours, I feel like this information is important to remember. The article tries to remind people that taking breaks isn't slacking off or wasting time - it's a healthy and necessary part of working that can make you do better and keep you from relying on caffeine or pushing yourself too far before you just collapse from exhaustion or burn out. I know I personally often see breaks or going out as unproductive time, and that makes me especially vulnerable to burning out mentally and emotionally. I'm taking the advice in this article and I'm going to try and take more short breaks when I work, not just to help me work better but to take care of my own mental health. It's something I hope others read and see, and that I think needs to be emphasized more with our heavy course load and long class hours to keep students performing the best they can and staying healthy physically and mentally.
The psychology of break taking is one that I will now be looking into more. I don't really think about when I time my breaks. I just take them when I feel a mental block and can not work any further. And while this method is sometimes effective, it can also mean that my work deteriorates throughout the time that I am working. While it would take me a while to get into taking deliberate and active breaks, I'm definitely going to try this.
I think that as humans in a contemporary world we all have this sense that we aren't allowed to give ourselves time to breathe. We think that it will make us more productive to just push ourselves way beyond our limits of of focusing, then we will produce the best work. This article proves that that is untrue. Humans need scheduled breaks to find themselves being consistently productive.
I know I will be using the information that I read here to inform my break schedule from now on.
I think breaks are very important for productive work. If you just work for hours on end and do not take any breaks, your work will not be as good as it could be because your brain cannot work like that. In rehearsal the equity breaks are to take a 5 minute break after working for 55 minutes and then a 10 minute break after working 80 minutes. Those two rages of time line up with the article that you should break after every 52 minutes and 75 to 90 minutes. If you do not take breaks in rehearsal then the actors will get tired and will not be very focused. If they are emotionally exhausted then they are not able to give their best performance and fully emerge themselves in the character. The director also needs to take a break even though they often like to continue working and use up as much time as possible to get things done. Especially with an emotionally draining play everyone in the room needs to step away for a moment to collect themselves and not be intensely focused on the work.
I spent most of yesterday’s load in juggling the chaos onstage and my calculus homework. I spent the last two hours banging my head on the table because I could not work through one of the problems. I tried every convergence test I could think of. I rewrote the problem several times. Then 10:30 hit and I minimized that window and took Load In Meeting Minutes and cleaned up and locked the Chosky and went home. I spent the shuttle ride listening to music. I nearly fell asleep. I was idly pondering my grocery list when I walked through my front door. And all of a sudden it hit me. I had the solution to that impossible problem from half an hour ago right in front of me. And while I can’t be certain that half hour break is what made me realize that solution, I will say that’s not the first time something like that has happened. And it makes sense. Equity breaks are every hour and a half. Most 3 hour lectures have a ten minute break in the middle. We take a break every two hours in crew. The average homework assignment takes an hour or an hour and a half. I wish more people would take breaks in mind when setting schedules, maybe the world would be more productive.
Taking breaks is something that I feel we are all told that we need to do and all know we should do for ourselves in order to keep our minds fresh and bodies productive but we often times neglect and decide is a lower priority. Its hard especially in a line of work such as theatre where there are such hard deadlines to remember to take breaks in order to improve our work. I feel myself fighting this sometimes when I feel I've gotten into a "groove" I sometimes don't want to stop and neglect the fact until I absolutely need one. This often hurts my work and doesn't allow me to do my best work once I've hit that wall. Without taking breaks at go intervals I will work myself until I can't work anymore. This is something that I think employers and schools are getting more in touch with though and they are starting to force their employees and their students into these breaks so that they will be more productive.
What Emma is talking about in her comment is something that I see as a major benefit of breaks. It gives your mind time to sit in idle and think about things without having to actually think. This is one way breaks help, they allow us to get our mind to rest a little because with so much pressure, it is hard to come up with what we are trying to. Another good thing about a break is it allows us to come back to a problem with a relaxed mind. It is not that you are thinking about a problem during break, but that you aren’t thinking about anything during break. This is really important for mental health reasons. It gives your brain time to relax. Just like machines, we have a limit to how long our brains can run at max power. Our brain has a duty cycle and we need to respect that. Also if we know we are taking breaks every 52 minutes lets say, we will push to get a lot done in that amount of time. When we just say we will work until it’s done, it could take 3 hours, but if we say we have 52 minutes, we may push a little harder to get it done in that time.
As highlighted in this article, taking breaks is so crucial to success and productivity, yet they are almost viewed as a sign of weakness. I feel like it is so important to take breaks and allow yourself to gather thoughts, but I also feel like there is continual pressure (especially in an environment that is as intense, fast paced, and stress ridden like Carnegie Mellon) to make the most out of every second of every minute and a break is not a part of that code. “‘It’s not the amount of time you spend working, it’s what you get accomplished…We need to do away with time as a success metric. You can accomplish more when you give yourself breaks to reenergize.’” I feel like this quote from Pozen highlights the mentality that we as a community need to adopt, in order to be more productive in our environment but also be more productive as functioning humans.
This is extremely useful and important for college students to get this advice. I also appreciated how this article explained that there can be different break times for different types of work. Sometimes you are working on a major assignment that is several hours, or even days long, versus a shorter assignment that might only take an hour or so to complete. Living in a time where there is so much instant communication and distraction it is useful to have a blueprint for how best to compartmentalize your time. My favorite part of the article is how it discusses and explores multiple schools of thought. Too often article today are too one sided and do not explore multiple sides to an argument.
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