We all need breaks from time to time. Lunch is as good a time as any to take a break. You have to eat and you have to manage your energy. When you don’t break mid-day, the afternoon can easily disappear into unfocused email reading or social media checks. You might wind up staying late just to get your work done. If you’ve already worked through lunch, this can definitely lead to burnout!
Breaks are smart. But this raises the question: what should you do with this time during the work day that you aren’t working?
I think one of the best ideas is to read.
Fitting in an extra book
Not only is reading a nice mental pause, it’s a great way to add more reading to your life. If you read for 30 minutes at lunch twice a week, that’s an extra hour of reading time. A lot of commercial books take 4-6 hours to read, so this means you can read an extra book every 4-6 weeks, or an extra 8-13 books a year. Reading a dozen books a year puts you ahead of a lot of the population.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Many people find it challenging to take a lunch break in general.
But certain structural decisions can help. You can push for an office culture where morning meetings get scheduled on the hour, and afternoon ones on the half hour. This builds a 30 minute break in there somewhere.
You can also think 168 hours (a week) not 24 hours (a day). It’s good to socialize, and I’m a big fan of grabbing lunch with colleagues to nurture relationships. But you don’t have to do this five days a week. On your reading days, you can shut the door to your office (if you have one) and if you don’t, you can go elsewhere. Sitting in a park or a coffee shop or the restaurant where you grabbed your food can work. Even your car would be fine.
The upside of ebooks
If you are sitting in your cubicle, you might feel less awkward reading ebooks on your phone vs. pulling a paperback out of your bag. Sometimes people feel judged for not doing stuff that looks like work 100 percent of the time. But people look at their phones all day long. No one has any idea what you’re doing on a phone, so feel free to put ebooks on there and read on the Kindle app.
By putting your brain in a different space for half an hour, you’ll return to work with new ideas. And you’ll feel like you got a mini vacation. You’re not on the beach, but you can indulge in a beach read. That’s a lot more relaxing than reading headlines!
This is one reason I always keep a book on my Kindle, even if I'm more engaged with the one on my nightstand. Like Rory Gilmore, you never know when you're going to want to read!
I ALWAYS have a book with me whether it's one I leave at the office (to read during lunch!!) or one to two books in progress on my Kindle app on the phone. You just never know when you might get a little downtime and can pop open the app to get some reading in. I always get the question from friends/family/colleagues - "how do you read so many books?". My answer is that I stay off of social media all day (20 minute block in evening for that indulgence) and spend the time others do scrolling to read!