Not everyone has control over their work hours. But most people have some control over the time during the work day when they are not working — that is, when they are taking breaks. In some jobs these are formal, and in others you take them as you can, but almost everyone takes some sort of break, if for no other reason than that people need to go to the bathroom.
However, especially in information jobs, I find that these breaks are often unintentional. Maybe you’re in your inbox, doing work tasks, when you get an email with a breaking news alert. You click over to that publication to read the story, and while there, the algorithm hooks you with a story that it (correctly!) guesses would irk you, and here you are reading down to the 30th comment, getting more annoyed, when you realize you need to get back to work. That was a break, but it didn’t feel relaxing. Indeed, since you never got away from the tools you use to work, you probably didn’t even notice it was happening.
A better approach is to try to take breaks more mindfully. In a lot of jobs, it would be doable to take 2-3 breaks per day. Perhaps one is a meal break, and the other 1-2 are shorter breaks. Consciously taking 30-60 minutes away from work over the course of the day to do intentional things would both feel better, and probably be more productive, than taking the exact same amount of time to scroll around online.
That’s straightforward enough, but if you really want to take your work breaks to the next level, I suggest building what I call a “break portfolio.”
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