The Art of Break Time

Your break times throughout each day are critical for your wellbeing and for your ability to work accurately and, most important, happily. Your team and coworkers need to make use of their break times, too, even when there’s more to be done—more that could get accomplished. When we allow our brains and bodies short periods of rest or meditation during the workday, we increase our attention span and our attention to detail, which makes customers happy to do business with us.

Own Your Work Time, Own Your Break

Differentiating between your work time and your break time allows you to compartmentalize and focus completely on the task at hand. So, as you define when you’ll take your breaks and how you’ll spend them, make sure you don’t think about work during this time and encourage your employees to completely distance themselves from the current project or work. Even designating the break room far from the warehouse or office floor can help create this physical and mental distance.

You can take this a step further by simply communicating with your employees that, when they take a break, even for fifteen minutes, that time is there’s to use how they’d like. But encourage activities like meditation or quiet space where they won’t feel the pressure of the work, or the project, or whatever else might be going on.

Breaks Divide Up Time Into Manageable Chunks

Especially when you’re at your busiest—or a have a large-scale project to a complete—you need to use your break times to divide that project into manageable chunks. This is true for your business and true for your employees. If you can separate long projects into manageable shifts that get divided by quick breaks, you’ll see a change in attitude and production.

Just Leaving Your Desk Can Improve Your Mood and Productivity

Sometimes all we need for a change in mood is a change in scenery, which is why you should encourage your employees to walk around, conduct walking meetings, or pick a day once a week where you don’t write emails but communicate face-to-face. When you don’t feel like you need to be glued to your chair, you enjoy your work more, see it as a place of creativity and problem-solving.  

At the end of the day, this can be boiled down to a customer service issue—guaranteeing quality service by creating an environment your employees enjoy, where they can concentrate on details that assure your customers get the best.