Take the lunch

I used to skip lunch.

The prospect of squeezing an extra hour of productivity into the day was too good to pass up.

So much can be done in an hour! (Or so I thought)

Project work, responding to messages, getting organized… let’s go!

Boy was I in for a rude awakening though, because it turns out that this idyllic picture of a hyperfocused, hyperproductive, uninterrupted day basically never happens in practice.

By around noon time every day during this no-lunch experiment, my brain started to tap out — it needed a break, or at least that’s what it was trying to tell me.

But me, being bullish as ever, figured that I just needed to adapt and then I’d be fine.

So I flat out said (not really): “brain, you’re so wrong!” And attempted to bulldoze through the lunch hour and the rest of the day.

Guess what? Doesn’t work. I was about as effective as a combustion engine running on gasoline fumes, which is to say I was pretty useless.

In her book Attention Span, Dr. Gloria Mark offers a great analogy to explain why: “We can’t meet the high mental challenge of being focused for long stretches throughout the day, just as we can’t be challenged to lift weights nonstop all the day, without performance starting to degrade when we run out of energy (or cognitive resources), which usually happens well before the end of a typical eight-hour day”.

If you’re reading this right now and thinking to yourself that you’re clearly the exception — consider me and Dr. Mark and thoroughly unconvinced.

Downtime is not the enemy, it’s your sidekick!

Take the lunch or some metaphorical version of it — take a walk, chat with a friend. Step away.

Your mind needs to take breaks so it can kick ass when it matters.