The blog

Do you enjoy work­ing? Do you find it easy to get into a high work­ing-pace where you enjoy the process of doing, check­ing off, send­ing, check­ing off, reply­ing, check­ing off, com­pil­ing, check­ing off, and so on? Do you some­times catch your­self sud­den­ly hav­ing worked for tree or four hours straight with­out even get­ting out of your chair?

You look up from your screen some­what light-head­ed and think ​”Hm, where am I?”. Well, that last bit might be push­ing it, but if it sounds some­what famil­iar, you are not alone.

Some of us sim­ply for­get tak­ing breaks.

If you do not remem­ber, be reminded
Cre­ate some kind of struc­ture that helps you remem­ber to take a break.

If you do not take breaks you will just even­tu­al­ly get tired. Then it will not be as easy to get going with the things you feel you should do. So if you do not take breaks, it will sim­ply be more dif­fi­cult to do what you need to do.

Do this
Here are four ideas of what you can do to remind yourself.

• Add a recur­ring ten-minute meet­ing in your cal­en­dar with an alarm set to ring same time every hour through­out your workday.


• When you sit down to work, set the timer on your phone to 50 minutes.


• Once you are work­ing, do so in inter­vals like in the Pomodoro-technique.


• There are apps for this as well, such as Break Time for iPhone. I still have not found a good equiv­a­lent for Android. Per­haps you know one?

More breaks will mean more done
If you allow a struc­tured method to inten­tion­al­ly remind you and hence make it eas­i­er to know when it is time for a break, you will have more ener­gy and be alert for longer peri­ods of time. Well, if you actu­al­ly take the breaks you are remind­ing your­self of, that is.

You take your mind off what you are doing and get oth­er impres­sions not con­cerned with work. By doing so you will prob­a­bly get new per­spec­tives on the task you are work­ing with as well. If you put your work aside and read a book for a few min­utes while lean­ing back and relax­ing in your chair, don’t be sur­prised if what you read rubs off on how you solve your task lat­er. Every thing you do sim­ply affects all oth­er things you do.

And your method?
What is your way of remem­ber­ing to take breaks and lift your­self out of your focused state before it becomes absolute­ly nec­es­sary? Leave a com­ment and tell us.