Not Working Makes Us Work Harder… Hear Me Out - Jill Johnson

Imagine a scene for me, you are sitting in your computer in your office. It is Thursday evening. Your head hurts from staring at the screen since you got to work in the morning. Pretty easy to imagine isn’t it? You probably have experienced something similar, most of us have. Whether its school or work, the notion of working long hard hours is something many of us are familiar with. Now enter the magic words spoken by many worn out workers, “I need a break”. The words have become a euphemism for “yep, I’m done working I think I’ll just go turn on Netflix” but the idea of having downtime during the workday is an entirely different idea.

At g4g, our breaks were often left up to our discretion. When you finished a project, you got up to refill your long empty coffee cup, maybe stretch your legs a bit. Then after a few minutes you sit back down and get back to work. At lunch we sometimes walked to grab a quick bite. 45 minutes a day, to decompress after several hours of concentration. And on those occasions, I often found that after lunch I became more productive. I had a little more energy; it was a punch of the refresh button. The most common form of break in Brussels

though, was the smoke break. Those who smoked in the office paused maybe once every other hour to take a few minutes, step outside, and smoke. I am not an advocate for smoking, but they may be on to something with this break idea (minus the cigarette) because I never found that those coworkers who chose to step outside were any less productive than those of us who didn’t.

At the end of the week, Friday afternoons you could expect find a livelier and chattier atelier than on a Tuesday. This is because everyone knew they had two full days ahead of them to relax after a stressful week. The extended work break if you will.

What I found in my time as an intern at g4g, is that breaks can be good for productivity. Not the kind of break that deteriorates into two hours of Netflix and procrastination. The kind where you take a step back, breath a bit of fresh air, and let your mind slow down for a few minutes.

Four-day work weeks are another matter entirely. I would love the idea of a four-day work week, however I’m not sure it’s very practical to assume that everyone can just cut out a day. My internship allotted me four days to work each week, Monday through Thursday. And every week without fail, I felt as though I had missed something the day that I was gone. I loved my extra day of downtime, but I do not think it made me more productive.

There is an idea that offices are not productive during Friday afternoons anyway, so why make people work them. But cutting out Friday as a work-day doesn’t eliminate that problem, it simply shifts the unproductive time from Friday afternoon, to Thursday afternoon. Instead of cutting out a day, maybe cut down the number of hours people work over the whole week. Who really is productive a whole day working from 9 to 5 (and let’s be honest, most of us work way longer than that)?