2024-09-28 11:43:34
By pausing for 17 minutes, your brain goes into passive mode where it sorts out facts and sees meaning
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A week or two off, a few days off on holidays and you’re back on the merry-go-round. You have so much work and you do it so conscientiously that you don’t have a spare minute during the whole 8 hours every day. And sometimes you add up to 10 or 12 hours. You don’t even go out on your lunch break, you always have something urgent to do.
That’s it a big mistake that damages your productivity and professional success.
Holidays that officially interrupt working hours are not given by chance. If they weren’t necessary for employee efficiency, bosses would ban them. It is clear that
only a robot can work tirelessly for 8 hours. So you’re sabotaging yourself by not stopping for at least your scheduled rest.
But apart from it, you should indulge in a little idleness during working hours. Career development experts believe that this is how you will be much more successful.
Only at first glance, idleness is the opposite of productivity. Even if you work on an assembly line, you need breaks to refresh yourself, to be able to focus again and produce quality. And in most processes today, not just concentration is required to perform tasks automatically, creativity is also required. It’s what suffers the most when you don’t stop periodically to let your mind wander, as the experts say.
Josh Davis, author of Two Amazing Hours compares mental work to push-ups. You want to do 10,000 push-ups. It would be most productive to do them all at once, without interruption. But it’s impossible. If you break them down into small bursts over several weeks and months, then it’s realistic to be able to get them up to 10,000. “In this respect, the brain is a lot like a muscle,” Davis writes. achieve little. But once we create the right conditions, almost anything will be within our power.”
Most people, however they think of their brain as a computer that can work continuously for at least 8 hours a day all the time efficiently. Don’t overestimate yourself and remember that your concentration and productive time is not unlimited. If your body says “I want a break”, give it a break. Then it will thank you by working better.
The problem is that many employees don’t realize this. They don’t stop, they get overtired, they become even less efficient, they have to work more. Into this merry-go-round they bring diseases. Although they know a lot of statistical medical facts about how this affects health, they do not take any measures because they say to themselves “Well, I can’t do anything, I have so many tasks”.
If you’re one of them, maybe you’ll be convinced of the benefits of a little idleness by research that proves that most people can work really efficiently for only 1 hour. Then a short break helps you stay focused and continue to perform your tasks at a high level. If you don’t interrupt, you degrade performance. “work in vain, do not stand in vain” is obtained.
In fact, these moments of idleness are not exactly idleness. When you stop for 10-15 minutes and do nothing, your brain doesn’t shut down. A part of it is activated, which specialists call network for passive mode of operation. It plays an important role in memory consolidation.
It has probably happened to you in the evening, after you have rested, that you suddenly remember something that you forgot, lost in your immediate tasks. Or it might give you a glimpse of how to solve a problem that seemed hopelessly difficult when you thought about it intently. It happens because your brain in its passive mode of operation has arranged facts, seen connections, foreseen consequences.
Just the apparent idleness – ie. the passive mode of brain work, helps for new ideas. The creativity zone is activated when you make associations between seemingly unrelated elements, experts explain.
Insight does not come by chance, examples are great scientists. It is not a legend that while taking a bath, Archimedes called out “Eureka” – he discovered that any body immersed in a liquid becomes as light as the liquid displaced by it. Shutting down from work, he realized a physical law. And Isaac Newton himself tells how he discovered the law of gravity – while carelessly drinking tea, sitting under an apple tree. He watched an apple fall and “it was as if gravity itself went to his head” – in his own words. (From them comes the myth that the apple fell on his head, but he does not mention that such a thing happened.)
If you just work all day and don’t give yourself time to think things through, you just react and act, committing yourself to maladaptive behavior.
It will not lead you to success in whatever tasks you undertake. Therefore, allow yourself moments of idleness, and if this word disturbs you, call them “passive mode of mental work” necessary for memory consolidation.
Research shows that you don’t need to be inactive for long to recharge. According to the experiments of Bob Posen, author of the book “Extreme Productivity”, most people, after they work for an hour and a half and then rest for 15 minuteshelp the brain consolidate information.
According to a study done with time and productivity tracking software, the most effective are 52 minutes of work and then 17 minutes of rest.
How long it takes depends on the individual, but get used to stopping for at least 10 minutes and you will feel how well they affect your productivity, experts assure.
— Research: Those who regularly take vacations are more likely to be promoted
An American survey of more than 5,000 employees found that you shouldn’t underestimate the days off you’re entitled to by law. People who take less than 10 days of vacation per year are less likely to get a raise than those who take more days.
This research does not deal with the distribution of the paid annual leave entitlement, but others have suggested that if you are entitled to 20 working days, it is wise to divide them into four tranches – one large and smaller ones, which you can combine with holidays, falling during the week.
The big tranche is at least two working weeks of summer vacation, i.e. 16 calendar days including the weekend before it starts. According to studies, it takes 8-11 days to relieve stress. The health and mental state begin to gradually improve after the start of the holiday, and the climax occurs on the eighth day. This happens if you are in a calm place. If you visit crowded tourist attractions, it takes more time to unwind.
Scientists have very practical advice on how to organize the 16 days during which you will not work in order to rest as well as possible. Leave Saturday for completing homework and leisurely preparations for the trip. Travel on Sunday. In the next 11 days, relax. Plan for one day to return and at least two more in which you will relax at home, see relatives and friends, fix something.
This way you will smoothly return to your normal rhythm of life and work. If you get straight out of the car or plane and dive into business tasks, you run the risk of getting hit the so-called post-holiday syndrome – absent-mindedness, unproductiveness and irritability due to the lack of adaptation from vacation to business pace.
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