Giving your brain the space to work
Taking short breaks during your work isn't slacking off; it's an essential ingredient in both creativity and productivity. Here's why:
Running time 3:26
Key points:
Vigilance decrement is a phenomenon psychologists have known about and studied for almost 50 years. Essentially it means that the longer you concentrate on the same task, the less effective you become at it.
At the University of Illinois tested groups of students by getting them to work on the same task for 50 minutes. One group was deliberately distracted twice during the assignment. That was the only group who's performance at the task did not decline over the course of the study. Giving their brains something different to do, even for less than a minute, made a big difference to their concentration.
Many other studies have found that when we break off a task, our brains continue to process and make connections with the information we’ve taken in. Even taking a couple of minutes away from the desk to make a cup of tea will let your brain assimilate what you’ve read, make connections with what you know, and bring up all sorts of related facts, questions and conflicts.
So the next time you find yourself working on the same task, or in the same meeting, for more than half an hour, take a short break and just spend one or two minutes thinking about something else. It will pay you back many times over the rest of the day.